And there they are. It’s a very good picture of Daniela kissing Tracy, her ex. And now I spot another ugly detail. Daniela is wearing a very beautiful black V-neck angora sweater. And now I hurt even worse.

“Ugh.” I hand it back. “She was wearing the sweater. Fuck.”

“What’s that?” Alec asks. He pulls onto the highway and we continue on our way.

“I knitted that sweater she’s wearing tonight.”

“You made it yourself?” he asks. “Whoa. There’s some gratitude for you.”

I just sigh.

“Are you going to be okay?”

That is a good question. “I will be.” As soon as my thundercloud of rage passes overhead.

“Must have been hard to see,” he says in a low voice. “A shock, right? The heartbreak will set in later.”

“That’s the thing…” I clear my throat. “I don’t even know if it will.” Once I hear myself admit that, I realize it might even be true.

Alec waits quietly for me to go on. I watch his big hands grip the steering wheel, while I attempt to sort out my emotions. “We weren’t working out. As a couple.” There. I said it out loud. “But I hoped we would. I wanted us to. And in the beginning, Daniela was fun.”

“Then what happened?” he asks

“Well…” This part is hard to talk about. “When we got together, both of us were trying to get over other people. You just met Daniela’s ex, Tracy. I’d never seen her in person before tonight. But Daniela told me straight up that Tracy broke her heart.”

Alec makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat. “I can’t really see anyone falling hard for that rude b—” He bites off the end of the sentence. “She’s someone I never needed to meet.”

“Me neither,” I grumble. Although, maybe meeting her like that had been necessary. “The thing is, I really wanted to move on. But I don’t think Daniela really wanted to get over Tracy. That’s why we didn’t work out. I was ready to try to love someone else, and she couldn’t get there. Not that she handled it very well. She was hard on me, when I wasn’t really the problem.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” There had been way too many times when she’d been shitty to me, and I had just ignored it. The first time it got really out of hand was last summer, when Daniela got drunk at my brother’s wedding. She’d told my friends and family that I wasn’t any fun.

Come to think of it, Alec had asked me to dance that night. It had only been for a few minutes, but I’d still been flattered.

Now I wonder if he’d been feeling sorry for me.

“I put up with her for way too long,” I say. “But I thought I could wait her out—that she’d remember the fun we had at the beginning, and realize we could have a future.”

“Dude,” he says. “Lots of people make that mistake—hoping things will just get better.”