“You don’t have to go, you can stay here,” I say. “You can hate me all you want. I promise I’ll stay out of your way. Just please don’t go.”

She slams the lid of the suitcase, fastening it shut aggressively. Wheeling it behind her, she arrives at the front door and grabs her coat and car keys without looking back. Panic makes my bones shake, and I have no idea how to convince her to stay.

When she reaches for the doorknob, I spring forward, grabbing her wrist gently. “I can’t be by myself,” I admit, barely above a whisper.

For the briefest of seconds, it looks as though she might cave. But then her lips pull into a sneer.

“Maybe you can ask Parker to stay with you. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time.” Her gaze falls to the crumpled paper in my hand, and she scoffs darkly, shaking her head. “I hope you’re happy,” she tells me. “You two deserve each other. You’re both pieces of shit.”

With that, Audrey shakes me off, exiting the house and slamming the door behind her.

I remain in place, shell-shocked and frozen. And then I tear up the letter in my hands, letting the fragments flutter to the ground, breathing hard.

Audrey and I were doomed from the beginning—doomed from the moment I kissed Parker, or maybe from the moment I met him. The three of us are irreversibly interwoven, three dominoes that collapsed onto each other until no one was left standing. I don’t think there’s a way to ever recover the trust that I’ve broken, even if I lived a million lifetimes.

There’s a disconnect between who I am now and who I was back then. It’s as though my life has been ruined by someone I’ve never even met, and I’ll spend the rest of it resenting them for what they’ve done.

But then Audrey’s scathing voice comes back to me.

You still did it. It was still you.

The affair, the email to McGill, it was all me. Nobody else can take the blame.

This whole time, I’ve been thinking of myself as cursed, someone who was dealt a cruel and unfair hand. But maybe this is karma’s way of giving me what I’m owed, and there was no hope of redeeming myself in the first place.

The clock ticks quietly in the kitchen, and all I want is for everything to stop. I find the will to move, leaving the entrance on legs that feel as though they’ve been carved from wood.