“Yeeeesss. I’m starving.” My stomach had been gnawing at me for the last two hours. “If we order now, it’ll show up right when we’re done,” I whispered.
He laughed a little. Then we both noticed that the door was still open but nobody had gotten on.
Jacob glanced over first. Then I turned too. And my blood ran cold.
It was the Tower of Terror at Disney World on my twenty-fifth birthday. The elevator doors opening to show you something awful and confusing before plummeting you to your death.
It was Nick and Kelly.
They stood frozen, like deer in headlights. Nobody moved.
They were dressed up. She had her arm hooked in his. Nick’s brown hair was shorter. He looked fitter than before. He was tan. He had a band on his wedding finger. Kelly’s blond hair was down around her shoulders. Pink lipstick. Dangly gold earrings that looked like leaves. She was wearing an enormous diamond wedding ring. She was glowing.
And she was pregnant.
I felt instantly nauseous. Lieutenant Dan made a crying noise in the silence. Time stood still.
Nick cleared his throat. “Uh, we’ll take the next one.”
I stood there for another painful, paralyzed moment. And then the doors closed in slow motion.
The whole thing had taken less than fifteen seconds. And the bomb was nuclear.
“Briana?” Jacob said, staring at the side of my face.
I couldn’t hear him. My ears were ringing. My knees were weak, my vision was getting dark around the edges.
And then I threw up all over his shoes.
Chapter 44
Jacob
Are you okay?” I asked.
Briana had her forehead against the truck window. We were almost home. She hadn’t talked for most of the ride. Or in the hotel room while we packed up this morning. Or anytime, really, since the encounter in the elevator last night.
It was a long moment before she answered me. “I’m sorry I threw up on you,” she said again.
“That’s never happened to me before—in my office job as an accountant.”
She laughed a little, but there was no mirth in it.
Lieutenant Dan was sitting with his head on her lap. He’d been whining and crying to get to her from the back seat so badly I finally pulled over and let him sit with her. Same thing last night. I had to let him sleep on the bed.
“Was that the first time you’ve seen them together?” I asked.
She didn’t reply. I reached over and grabbed her hand. She didn’t squeeze it back.
Something was off.
I understood why she was upset. Running into her ex-husband and the woman he’d left her for and seeing that they were married and pregnant had to be jarring.
But there was something else going on too. She hadn’t looked me in the eye since the elevator incident. And it made a knot form in the pit of my stomach and my anxiety fire to life.
Maybe I was worried about something that wasn’t anything to be concerned about? She was just in shock and not feeling well and needed some time to process.
But she didn’t take the bouquet this morning. She’d been so happy to catch it last night. She’d said she wanted to dry it. And then she just left it on the hotel dresser. When I went to pick it up, she said she didn’t want it. It felt like some kind of omen that I didn’t want to think about too closely.
We drove the rest of the way home in silence. When we pulled into the garage, she got out. I grabbed her luggage out of the trunk, but she wouldn’t let me take it up the steps to the house for her. She just mumbled that she had it and started walking, dragging it without waiting for me. When I came in after her, she was standing in the living room staring at the couch.
“I’ll make you some soup,” I said, setting down my duffel bag. “Maybe we can watch a movie? Or Schitt’s Creek?”
I came up behind her and hugged her. She tensed. My stomach dropped.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She wriggled slowly away from me, like she was shrugging out of a dirty jacket and didn’t want to touch more of it than she had to.
She turned to look at me with bloodshot eyes. “I’m going home.”
I swallowed. “Okay…” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
My heart was picking up. “All right. When will you be back?”
“I’m never going to live with you, Jacob.”
It was like a dagger that came out of nowhere.
“I’m never going to live with you, and I’m never going to marry you. If you want that, find someone else.”
“I…I don’t want someone else—”
“Well, maybe you should.” She stared at me red-eyed and defiant. Like it was me against her all of a sudden.
I shook my head. “Why are you fighting with me?”
“I’m not,” she said, her voice clipped. “I’m just telling you the way it is.”
I licked my lips. “Look. What happened last night was traumatic. Let’s talk about it—”
“No.”
I studied her face.
“Briana,” I said carefully. “I’m not going to do to you what he did. If you’re worried about that—”
She burst into laughter. Deep, guttural laughs like I’d never heard from her.
“You don’t know what you’ll never do,” she said. “Maybe you’ll get sick of me. Maybe you’ll meet someone else you can’t live without. And then I’ll come home early and my Bluetooth will connect to your phone when I pull into the garage and I’ll get to hear my friend telling my husband of ten years how much she enjoyed fucking him on my new duvet.” She cracked up, like this was hilarious.
“Oh,” she said like she just remembered. “And then he leaves me for her, and while they’re in my house, eating off my plates and sleeping in my bed, I miscarry our baby. Alone. In my shitty childhood bedroom with my shitty Smallville posters on the walls. Which worked out great for him because he didn’t want my baby anyway.”
I blinked at her. “I…I had no idea that happened to you—”
“Well, it did. And no, you won’t do that to me, Jacob. Because I won’t let you.” She grabbed the handle of her luggage and started for the door. “I don’t live here. I want to go home. I want my mom.”
I grabbed her wrist. “Briana, I’m not him—”
She yanked her arm away from me. “Every man is him! You are all the fucking same!” Her voice cracked on the last word. “You aren’t until you are.” Her breath was coming out shaky. “You won’t like me once you really know me, or you’ll find someone else or you’ll want something different and then you’ll leave. So just do it now. Save me the trouble.”
My chest was rising and falling, sheer panic pulsing inside me. I didn’t know what to say. Everything I said was making it worse, and I didn’t know what to do.
Her face changed a dozen times in the long seconds we looked at each other. Anger. Hurt. Sadness. Fear. And then finally something softer and resigned and broken.
“I need to be alone right now, Jacob,” she whispered. “Just…leave me alone.”
And she left.
Chapter 45
Briana
Mom handed me a hot tea and put a hand to my forehead. “No fever. Maybe just a stomach bug.” She sat on the bed next to me.