“You are my fiancée and I am entitled to know where you are spending your nights.”

“Excuse me? Your fiancée ? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Emma, come on…”

“We broke up. We are over.”

“You can't be serious.”

“No, you can't be serious,” I say, throwing my hands in the air.

“I told you that I was sorry.”

“I don't care. We are over. You have been sleeping with your boss for five years. You were together longer with her than you were with me. Don't you see how sick that is?”

“It's all over now. I love you.”

“I don't care. I'm not going to put up with shit like that. I'm not my mom.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Are your parents having problems?”

I turn my body away from him, but he puts his hands on my shoulders. I shrug them off and take a few steps away.

“You want to know what happened with Liam?”

“Uh-huh,” Alex says, narrowing his eyes.

“You really want to know?” I say, tapping my foot on the linoleum floor. “I slept with him. It was nice. I liked him. Then he ended up being just another liar.”

“You did not sleep with him,” he says, shaking his head after a long pause.

“Believe what you want, but it's the truth.”

He drops his shoulders down and leans against the wall. He looks so fractured that I almost feel bad for him.

Almost.

Whatever he is feeling right now, he deserves every molecule of that pain. He hurt me and it feels good to hurt him back, but just like a sugar rush, the high from my revenge doesn't last.

“I'm sorry that I drove you to that,” he says after a long pause.

I bite my lower lip. I don't know how to take that.

It sounds like an apology, but it's really window dressing.

“You didn't drive me to do anything. We broke up. Liam is hot. We talked about writing and literature and I slept with him. I slept with him because I wanted to,” I say the words quickly to make little cuts with a sharp dagger on his heart.

Whether or not it’s successful, it's hard to tell.

“You're just saying that to piss me off,” he says after a while.

“Is it working?”

“No,” he says without giving me the satisfaction of seeing his reaction.

I hate to admit it, but he has won this round.

He pushed me over the edge, but I can do the same thing to him.

Partly it's our personalities, but partly it's the fact that he just simply doesn't give a shit about me.

I've had enough. I turn around and start to walk away from him back toward the waiting room.

Right before I get to the end of the hallway, he runs up to me and thrusts his arms around my shoulders.

“Emma, I'm really sorry. I'm such a fuck-up.”

I stand here, unable to move. It's not just the weight of his body pressed firmly against mine that makes me completely rigid, it's something else.

It's the pain that I suddenly feel, the pain that I had pushed away this whole time.

I loved this man. I thought that he had loved me, too.

Maybe a part of him did. I loved him with my whole heart.

I thought that we would be the perfect match and then suddenly, one afternoon, I discovered that everything I believed about us was a lie.

How do you get over something like that?

How do you just move on?

I thought I could do that by jumping in bed with the first interesting man that I met, but now I know that I need more time.

Now I know that I can't be with Alex, but that doesn't mean that a part of me still doesn't have love for him.

It is this part that needs space and it is this part that needs time to heal.

“Get off me,” I say quietly but calmly.

His grip loosens and he pulls away.

He’s standing so close behind me that I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. It sends shivers up my spine.

“We are through,” I say, still looking straight ahead but knowing full well that he can hear me.

I wait for him to ask me to reconsider, but this time he doesn't.

Instead, he inhales deeply and then leans over to my ear and whispers, “You're going to regret this.”

The hairs on the back of my arm stand up. This is a threat.

He’s saying this to scare me, to instill fear into me.

I've never heard him say anything like this before, but whatever shaky ground my decision to get away from him was standing on, it's only solidified it.

A person who really loves me and who really wants me back would never say anything like that. He would never try to frighten me or threaten me.

“What did you say?” I ask, turning around, my eyes challenging his.

“You heard me. I asked you to stay nicely and I told you that I want you back, but you don't seem to get that.”

“Get what?” I ask. “This is an optional arrangement. I'm not going to marry if I don't want to.”

“I know that,” Alex says, “but that doesn't change the fact that you're going to regret it.”

“Emma, Alex, good news!” Craig comes out from behind the corner with a huge smile on his face. “Lindsey and the baby are okay.”

28

Emma

As soon as Craig comes out and tells me that Lindsey and the baby are doing well, a wave of relief rushes over me and I feel like I have just stood up too fast.

“So, what do they think happened? Why was she bleeding?”

“They don't know for sure, but they’re monitoring her and she needs to be on bed rest. The baby's heartbeat is there and it's good. They're discharging Lindsey now.”

Craig looks like he has aged ten years during this one day at the hospital and I wrap my arms firmly around his neck and rub his back.

He lets out a long sigh, holding me tightly.

After we pull away, I head straight back to the waiting room and embrace my mom, my dad, and Brooke.

It's hard to describe the euphoria of relief that exists in that room at that moment, but it reminds me of what's really important in life.

Lindsey is released from the hospital a few hours later and my parents go to help Craig get her home.

Lindsey, of course, keeps insisting that this has all been a massive overreaction, but I can tell that she is as relieved as the rest of us.

I don't speak to Alex again that evening.

I decide to let his threat go and not dwell on it too much, writing it off to something he said out of anger or disappointment. I hope I'm right, but I'm not going to give it anymore thought tonight.

As soon as I get home, I want to crawl straight under the covers, but I make myself a big cup of coffee and open my laptop instead.

I'm tired, exhausted, and spent, but I have a number of unanswered questions that I hope I can find some answers to.

When I look up Liam Linville on Facebook, I see a profile out of Seattle.

He hasn’t been active on it for a while, but the profile picture is clearly Liam's.

He's much younger, but I immediately know that it's him. The privacy settings are too strict and I can see that he got his bachelor's degree at the University of Washington, majoring in English.