Page 84 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I don't understand a thing.

I drive anyway. Forty miles is all I've got in me, and the Lakeview Motor Lodge's vacancy sign is the first one lit, so that's where I stop. Room 6. A bed that smells like bleach and a painting of a lake that isn't out any window here.

I put my phone face-down on the nightstand because I'm a coward with excellent self-awareness.

I lie on top of the covers with my shoes on, one hand low on my belly, and I talk to the lentil because there's nobody else left to talk to.

"It's you and me, sprout. I'm real good at starting over. You'll see. I've got it down to a science."

The phone buzzes.

I let it.

It buzzes again. And again. And keeps on, that rattling angry-hornet sound against the wood grain, until the sky outside the curtain gap has gone the color of a healing bruise.

Sunrise. I can't stand it anymore. I flip it over.

Owen. Owen. Owen. Eleven missed calls, stacked up like patients in a waiting room.

And one text, sitting under all of it, two words long.

My heart doesn't drop. It stops.

I know.

Chapter twenty-five

I know

OWEN

Six forty a.m. Same morning.

Tater runs me back from the mill to his place, where my truck's been sitting in the yard since the party. Nose-in by the fence, dew on the windshield, like the whole world didn't change while it sat there.

He tells me to come in and eat something. I tell him I can't sit still. He looks at me a long second and lets me go.

So I drive to Juniper Lane with the smell of the mill still in my hair.

I don't know what I think I'll find. She's gone. Debbie said it at the tape line and the words haven't quit saying themselves since. She left for Millbrook tonight. My hands turn the wheel anyway. My hands don't believe it yet.

The cottage sits there in the early light. Porch swept. Curtains open. Her car gone from the gravel.

The key's under the frog planter where she always leaves it. I let myself in.

I knew it would be empty. Knowing doesn't help.

Not messy-empty. Nellie-empty. Counters wiped. Floors done. The bed stripped; sheets folded square on the mattress like a hotel waiting on the next guest. She cleaned the place on her way out of my life.

Of course she did. You don't leave a mess if you're never coming back for it.

The whiteboard's still on the kitchen wall.

Blank. Every med time gone. The cheating tally gone. Two months of us, wiped. I stand in front of it and my chest does the thing it did in the smoke last night, tight and small, and I'm about to turn away when I see it. One corner. Down low. Letters so small I have to lean in.

angry sunshine was a good look on you

Her handwriting. She erased everything else and she couldn't erase that.