Saturdays were the worst. Well, the Saturdays that we were shooting were pretty great, but the ones that were empty, yawning and full of nothing were the worst. Sundays too. But Saturday was the harbinger of two desolate days where my paradise turned to hell. Every shadow resembled him, every moment without his scent, his touch, pure torture. Then I beat myself up for being such a pathetic female, mourning over a man who had dropped me without emotion and treated me coldly and cruelly for almost the entirety of our relationship.
It was an ugly, wretched and painful cycle. But I made it through, which was what truly mattered. I’d spent the day drinking coffee, half-assing an online Pilates workout, doing laundry and attempting to pull weeds in the garden. When I realized I’d accidently pulled out the flowers and left the weeds, I gave up, settling on the sofa to find some lifeless reality TV to get me through the day.
Tomorrow I’d do it all again, but hopefully I’d be hungover enough to sleep in, wasting away some of the day.
Yeah, I was pathetic.
I wondered what he was doing right now. Considering it was after midnight in L.A. right now, he might’ve been sleeping. Most likely not sleeping. It was Saturday morning there, which meant he was most likely with someone.
The thought scraped down my insides.
The crunch of wheels against gravel jerked me out of my pity party, my eyes narrowing toward the door I’d left open because I was planning on watering a couple of flowers at some point tonight.
Life was different here. It moved slower. People talked to strangers. No one locked their doors. As an L.A. girl, I’d scoffed at that and continued locking mine for at least the first month. Out of habit more than anything. I wasn’t scared of being here in the middle of nowhere alone. I wasn’t scared of much anymore. I’d forgotten, though. Gotten lazy here at the bottom of the world. However, this place that seemed so peaceful, so safe, was not immune to human wickedness. To danger. Nowhere was.
I highly doubted that the person pulling into my driveway was some assassin or serial killer coming to hurt me. No, that was not why my stomach dipped, not why my heart jumped up my throat or my hands started shaking.
It was because I thought of someone else who might be here. Someone who had already hurt me plenty and who I’d sell my soul to have back to hurt me some more. If he didn’t already own it, that was.
It was a fool’s hope. A little girl’s hope. A fantasy that the man who broke my heart would come back with the pieces in his hands, intact and ready to put them back together. Put me back together.
It wasn’t Janet. She drove a truck that roared and rumbled and sounded like thunder halfway down the drive.
I didn’t move in the time it took for the stranger to park. To get out of their car and walk up the front steps and through the door. Because I was standing there, frozen with hope, not fear.
It wasn’t a man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit standing in my door. No, life didn’t work that way. Instead, it was a five-foot-five woman in six-inch heels wearing Chanel and a shit eating grin.
“I swear to fuck I thought I was going to arrive to find you in some kind of shack and would have to drug you with horse tranquilizer to get you out of here,” she sassed, eyes flickering over me.
I crossed the living room at the same time as she did, meeting in the middle where we hugged like it had been half a lifetime since we’d seen one another. For us, it had. This was the longest I’d ever gone without seeing my girlfriends. I’d been too consumed by my heartbreak to realize how much I’d missed them all until this very moment. It wasn’t just a single man who could ruin me, keep me together then blow me apart. No, a man didn’t have that right. Not even him.
My girlfriends held valuable pieces of me, and Wren was bringing one tiny shred back. She held me tight, and I inhaled her perfume. The one that she’d had made especially for her. The one that was uniquely and perfectly Wren.
“Wren! Oh, my God, what are you doing here?” I asked, holding her much longer than our usual hugs.
Then again, there was nothing usual about this situation. About the fact that I’d never been farther from home as I had been these past months, had never been in a country where I didn’t have a close friend, didn’t have support, where I was entirely alone. Which, of course, had been the point. I’d had to get a world away from the man I loved, who broke my heart. But in doing so, I’d forgotten how important girlfriends were at helping to heal broken hearts. Or at least helping distract from the pain.