Chapter 3
The coat check was just a folding table by the service hallway door. A girl in a black vest handed us our coats without looking up. I don't think she wanted to be part of whatever had just happened in the ballroom.
Lauren's coat was a cream wool thing she'd been so careful about when we left the apartment. I held it open for her. She slipped her arms in and didn't look at me. Her hands were shaking and she tucked them into her pockets right away. The silver bracelet on her right wrist caught the hallway light for a second.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
I put on my own coat. My hands weren't steady either.
Behind us, the double doors to the ballroom stayed closed, but we could hear the low murmur of people trying to pretend they weren't talking about us. A server pushed through with a bus tray and the sound swelled for a half second — a laugh that cut off too fast, someone saying Ethan's name — then died again.
We stepped outside.
The parking lot was cold and damp. It had rained earlier and the asphalt shone under the lights. The string lights from inside spilled out through the tall windows and stretched across the parked cars in long warm stripes. The American flag we'd seen on the wall inside was folded and lit on a pole by the entrance, moving a little in the wind. My car was three rows back, next to Lauren's. We'd driven separately because she had to come early to help set up centerpieces. At the time it had seemed practical.
Lauren stopped between the two cars. She wrapped her coat tighter around herself. Her dress was thin for this weather and the wind lifted the edge of it against her legs.
"We shouldn't do this here," she said, glancing back toward the entrance where two other couples had just come out, heads down, walking fast to their cars.
I didn't answer right away. I could hear my own breathing. Inside, Ethan Cole was still holding that whiskey glass like nothing had happened, and the image of it wouldn't leave me. The level of the amber liquid hadn't even gone down much. He'd held it the whole time he'd said those things.
I asked the only thing I could make my mouth say.
"When did it start?"
She looked at the ground, then at my car, then nowhere.
"It's not like that," she said.
That was the evasion. One short sentence, and it told me she wasn't going to give me a date, a month, a story I could put on a timeline. Not here. Not now.
I felt the cold get into my collar.
"You lied to me every night to be with him," I said. It wasn't loud. It was almost quiet. "That's what you did."
I wasn't shouting. I wasn't repeating his words to hurt her. I was just saying what he'd said out loud in front of a hundred people, and what she'd let hang there without correcting. Her face tightened. She pressed her lips together and I saw her eyes fill again the way they had inside when she'd had her hands on his chest.
She took a step closer and her voice dropped to a whisper.
"Please, just wait till we get home," she said.
It was a plea, not an answer. Wait. Like time would make this smaller.
A door slammed somewhere across the lot. One of the couples getting into their car stared at us over the roof, then got in quickly. I understood what Lauren meant about doing this here. If we stayed between our cars talking, we were just giving everyone inside a second act to watch through the windows.
I looked at her car, then mine. The sensible thing, the awful sensible thing, was to not ride together.
"We'll drive home separately," I said.
She nodded once, too quickly, like she'd been hoping I'd say it. Or dreading it.
"You go first," she said. "I'll be right behind you. Two minutes."
I didn't want to agree. I wanted to say no, we go together, we don't leave this parking lot with a gap between us we can keep widening all the way home. But I could see the lights from the ballroom on her face and knew anyone looking out could see us.
"Two minutes," I said.
She pulled her keys out of her coat pocket. Her fingers fumbled and she almost dropped them.
May you like
I got into my car. The seat was cold. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and watched her in the rearview as she got into hers and shut the door. She didn't pull out right away. She sat bent forward, forehead almost touching the wheel, not moving.
I pulled out first, just like we'd agreed. In the mirror, her headlights came on a few seconds later and followed me out of the lot onto the county road. The string lights disappeared behind us, but the knot in my chest didn't loosen. We were driving home to the same house, but not together, and neither of us had said anything true yet.
