Page 77

COLE
I’d spentthe last three days with my new best friends: multiple bottles of bourbon.
I still couldn’t believe Jenny had left me. In spite of the bourbon, the painful scene when I discovered she’d gone kept replaying in my head.
We’d just come back from vacation. Jenny had agreed to move in with me. I worked from home that day, thinking everything was fine. But when I emerged from my office at lunchtime, she was gone.
“Babe?” I poked my head into the bedroom, but it was empty.
“Babe, you in the shower?” But instead of my girlfriend’s adorable tone-deaf signing-in-the-shower routine, there was only an eerie silence.
“Jenny?” I returned to the kitchen and saw a piece of paper on the island, secured by the fruit bowl. My stomach dropped as I snatched the note and read it.
I stood and stared at Jenny’s curly handwriting for five minutes. What the hell was she talking about?
She was… leaving?
She was leavingme?
I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in your world.
You’re a good guy.
I know you’ll make a nice girl real happy one day.
Thefuck? It was as if the words didn’t make sense. They swam before my eyes, perhaps trying to arrange themselves in an order I understood.
But as the silence stretched out, it started to hit me. Jenny was gone. “Fuck!” I grabbed the bowl and hurled it across the kitchen. It collided with the wall and shattered.”Fuck!”
I was angry but worse than that, I wascrushed. I’d told Jenny I loved her—the first time I’d ever said that to anyone. She said she loved me, too.
But then she’d run out on me and left me a fuckingnote?
I paced the kitchen, running my hands through my hair. Had I missed something? Did I say the wrong thing? Had she been pretending the whole time?
I felt sick, as if I might be coming down with the flu. My head throbbed.
This cannot be happening.
This cannot be happening tome.
I thought about our recent vacation to the Caribbean. We’d made love every day, enjoyed the beautiful water, drank fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them, and befriended an iguana. Well, Jenny made friends with the iguana. I’d been strangely jealous of the way she’d cooed over the scaly creature and fed it bites of mango…
Focus, Cole!Thinking about Jenny in her bikini, being kind to even the ugliest of animals, was getting me choked up. She couldn’t be serious about what she’d said. She couldn’t possiblymean it. Jenny wouldn’t leave me like this. She just told me she loved me! The memory of us on the beach together, when we’d shared our feelings, swept over me.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too.” Jenny’s eyes filled with tears.
The emotions rocked through me. Jenny meant it. It was real. She loved me—I knew she did. So why did she leave? I reread the note.
I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in your world.
I could understand this statement, even though I disagreed with it. Jenny might have whiplash. She’d gone from working as an escort and living in a shitty apartment in Roxbury (her words, not mine) to suddenly being billionaire-adjacent. She’d moved into the penthouse suite of Fifty Liberty, the most coveted building in Boston. I’d dragged her into a different existence.
But just because Jenny wasn’t from my world didn’t mean that she didn’t belong. She was a kind soul, gentle and loving. She was also my best friend.
Best friends don’t run out on you like that.