I refuse to believe we’re still on opposite sides, but I also have a habit of ignoring reality.

The mist has thickened and it’s foggy out as well, so I switch on my headlights as I reverse out of the parking lot. I can’t sit still for too long or I’ll combust. My conjured Nicholas dissipates in the high beams, gone with the flourish of my hand.

My soft, raw heart keeps presenting alternatives to what is happening. Defense mechanisms. Maybe he loves you, but he just doesn’t want to get married anymore. That’s not so bad. It’ll stay the way it is now. It’s finally feeling good again, even when it isn’t always easy.

But then I remember Nicholas down on one knee, the rest of the world blending into oblivion. Peering up at me anxiously, heart in hand. It’s not enough for you to be my girlfriend. I need you to be my wife.

Not anymore, it seems. Maybe he only loves me eighty percent. No. There’s no such thing as loving somebody eighty percent.

Am I okay staying with this man if it turns out he does love me but doesn’t want to wear my ring on his finger? Maybe he’ll change his mind someday. Maybe he didn’t mean to throw out six boxes of wedding invitations. Maybe he meant to put them in storage but got the bags mixed up. It’s all an accident, a misunderstanding, and we’ll laugh about this someday.

Either that or in a few months, Nicholas will have moved on to somebody else. This mystery woman will sleep on the palm-leaf comforter he and I picked out together. She’ll have the purple front door, and the narrow middle bedroom that could one day be a nursery. She’ll have Nicholas’s smiles, his skin on hers, his breath coiling in her hair while she sleeps. She’ll have Nicholas.

I could pretend I never looked inside the trash bag. I could drive home right now and come up with an excuse. I’ll say that after I left his Jeep in the driveway with the keys still in the ignition, food on the passenger seat, I was gripped by a sudden, all-consuming desire to get in my car and drive to the mall. I’ll say my phone died. I won’t acknowledge what I saw in the trash and it’ll be like it never happened. I can’t remember if I shoved the box back into the bag before I left, or if I tied it up. I hope I did. If I just left it sitting there, he’ll know I found out.

His actions last night make no sense today. How could I have misread him so wrongly? Maybe he only made love to me because he’d been driving all night and he was tired. He wasn’t himself. He woke up regretting what we did, possibly feeling taken advantage of. He’s mad at me. He thinks I tricked him.

The hours slip away as I drive and drive and drive. It’s dark when the road inevitably takes me back to Morris, even though I beg it not to. I still have no idea what I’m going to do. I don’t have any cash left after refilling on gas and keeping myself busy all day, which just leaves me with my credit card. The second a hotel charges me for a night’s stay, it’s going to pop up on his phone because we share the account and he gets a notification whenever a charge is made.

I’m hungry and haven’t eaten anything today, so I park in front of Jackie’s and go get two large orders of fries. I sit on the hood of my car and eat, the food warm in my cold fingers. I know what’s coming. I knew it since I handed my card to the cashier, and I’ve accepted it, which is why I don’t move a muscle when a Jeep Grand Cherokee rolls into the parking space next to mine.

I just stare straight ahead and eat another fry. I feel him watching me. Is this what he wanted? Either I know him better than anyone on this earth or I don’t know him at all. There is no in-between.

Nicholas leaves his car. Out of the corner of my eye I see that he’s clutching a dented blue box of invitations, and my throat burns like I’ve swallowed acid. “Naomi,” he says.

I can’t do this. “Please don’t. You win, okay? It’s over. I’ll end it so you don’t have to.”

He sits down next to me, car creaking under his weight. He balances the box carefully on his lap, and just having it this close makes the splinters of my heart prick my chest walls. We’ll never sit down and address them together. Our loved ones will never open them and smile, and say, They’re really getting married, then. They’re really going to do it. We’ll never face each other across a flower-strewn aisle and promise ourselves to each other forever.

“What do you mean, ‘over’?” Nicholas asks, quiet and throaty. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to break up with me after all we’ve been through. That’s not happening.”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“No.” His fingers slide under my chin, raising me to eye level with him. His gaze radiates an emotion I’m convinced he doesn’t feel, and it’s agony. “Sweetheart …”

My eyes cut to the box on his lap and I want to throw it. “Stop. I don’t want to hear anything else. It’s not necessary.”

“Oh, I think it’s very necessary.”

“It’s over. Just leave me alone.”

His eyes are smoldering. “Naomi, if you say one more time that we’re over, I’m going to lose my mind. I’ve been going crazy all day, not knowing where you went. You didn’t answer your phone, and when you drove away your driving was jerky and all over the place. Do you have any idea what that did to me? I was on the verge of calling up hospitals when I saw the credit card charge.”

It’s ridiculous that I feel guilty for worrying him. “I want you to go away. Please.”

“Because of this?” He taps the blue box, and I flinch.

“Because I’ve had a change of heart.”

I’m off the car before I know what’s happened, caged between the cold metal of the hood and Nicholas. There’s no room to dodge around him, nowhere to go. My senses reel, overpowered by him, collapsing into his touch to meld us perfectly together. His dark stare glitters with fear and fury, and something else that takes me another half second to translate. Need. Deep and burning. If I weren’t pinned, my knees would buckle.

He places his hand over my thumping, traitorous heart, commanding every nerve ending, every desire. I am wide, wide awake. He shudders an exhale and his face descends so close that I think it must end with a kiss, which is why I close my eyes.

“Your heart is mine,” he says.

Nicholas opens the box and removes an invitation. An RSVP card falls out and tears away, pinwheeling across the parking lot. “I’ve kept one of these folded up in my wallet for months,” he tells me. “I’d take it out and look at it sometimes, and I’d smile because I was so excited to marry you. But then I stopped being happy when I looked at them.”