Page 9 of The Five Year Lie

As long as the light stays red, a tiny piece of me can believe he’s there waiting.

It takes an eternity, but the light finally changes. I push forward, coasting through the intersection on shaky knees. I pedal slowly onto High Street, and the candelabra tree comes into view before I’m ready.

From this vantage point, there is no one visible beneath it. Still, the tree is so broad that an adult could easily be concealed by its powerful trunk.

I slow down, dragging my gaze off the tree, scanning the park for any familiar faces.Somebodysent me that text. Somebody asked me to meet him here.

But there are very few pedestrians this morning. I spot a homeless man shuffling toward the rose circle. And there’s a young woman in workout clothes walking a poodle. She doesn’t spare me a glance.

I dismount, and then walk my bike the final ten yards down the path, around the giant tree.

There’s nobody on the far side at all. Just an empty circle of wood chips beneath the tree. My eyes get suddenly hot and teary. I lay my bike down in the grass, and I walk underneath the canopy alone. I sit down on the ground, which is hard beneath my seat. And I pull out my phone and stare at the text again. I type into the text box.

Ariel: Drew?

Then, feeling foolish, I hit the button to send it. Not five seconds later, a red warning appears beside my text.

Undelivered. Try again?

I do. But the result is the same.

4

I sit in the park for two hours as the temperature climbs, until my limbs are stiff and I’m so parched I could cry.

Nobody approaches me. And now that I’ve done its bidding, my phone has gone silent.

Two hours is plenty of time to go down the rabbit hole of my life, though. And I don’t like what I find there.

When Drew left me, he did it in a cowardly way. It was the week my father died of an overdose of painkillers. That week is a blur. We were all so shocked. The funeral was several hours of Chime Co. employees hugging me and shaking their heads in disbelief.

But Drew didn’t turn up for the service. The only thing I remember clearly from that day is sitting in the church pew, my head swiveling around like a bobblehead doll trying to find him.

He wasn’t in the church, though. And for three days, he hadn’t answered any of my texts. I couldn’t understand it. Now that my father was gone, it didn’t matter who saw us together.

It wasn’t until the following Monday when I made it back to the office. And there it was—a message to my work email address, for fuck’s sake. It was the only email Drew ever sent me, and it had arrived on the morning of my father’s funeral. He’d probably sent it during the service, knowing I wouldn’t see it right away.

Ariel, I’m truly sorry. But this thing between us got awfully heavy awfully fast. And it’s time for me to move on. I’ll never forget you.

—D.

It’s that last line that really gutted me.I’ll never forget you.As if that’s reassuring, when I’d sailed way past the never-forget-you zone on the first kiss.

He broke me, and that wasbeforeI realized I was pregnant.

I spent the next several months trying to process Drew’s betrayal, while also trying to mourn a man who was cruel to me my whole life. I didn’t cry for my father, but I cried for Drew like I’d cry for a lost limb.

Meanwhile, my mother was also a mess. My father made her life hell, but there was no joy in his sudden passing. She was also the executor of his will, which meant lots of meetings and phone calls and a stack of death certificates that she and Ray had to FedEx in a hundred directions.

Without my uncle, it would have all been worse. Ray had to wear a lot of hats after my father’s death. He helped my mother untangle all the probate stuff. He was there when we needed him most.

And when I finally realized I was pregnant, Ray was the first one I told. Because it felt like a dress rehearsal for telling my mom. And because he’d always been kinder to me than my father. Not the type to take this sort of news by screaming at me for being an idiot.

“Oh, Ariel,” he’d said instead. “That’s amazing. And I’ve always thoughtRaymade a nice baby name for either a boy or a girl.”

I’d let out a laugh that ended up as a sob.

Ray is the only hugger in my family, so he’d pulled me into his arms. “Is it rude of me to ask who the father is? If you need me tobrandish a shotgun, I’ll need to check Reddit for some instructions first.”