“When? When I told you the truth about Claire, you made the choice to keep lying to me. And when I asked you point-blank about your relationship with Andrew at the bar, you made the choice to keep lying to me. And when we saw Andrew and Dylan together, you made the choice to keep lying to me!” She bends forward, so she’s bearing down on me like a cyclone of anger and hurt. “And when we had sex, you made the choice, then, too. And for what? For the money?”

“You have to understand! It’s not just money for me!” I’m frenzied now, shouting at her, shaking at her, wishing I could reach up for her. “I’m broke, Jack. I’m completely broke, and I financially support my mom, and my rent was going up, and—”

“Bullshit,” Jack interrupts. “That excuse is fucking bullshit. You didn’t keep the truth from me because of the money.”

“I—I did!”

“You didn’t,” Jack says. The tears have stopped, and I watch as she battens down the hatches on her own face, tucks away her hurt, turns to stone. “You lied to me because you always had one foot out the door, waiting for things to fall apart. Have you ever stopped to wonder why you were so fucking miserable before this week, Ellie?”

Ellie, not Elle.

“It’s because you make yourself miserable! You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy! The Perpetual Suck, as you apparently call it, is only perpetual because you expect it to be!” She jabs a finger at me again. “You only fail because you assume you already have! And you broke my heart because of that once, and now you’re breaking my heart over it again. I could forgive you for everything else….” She gestures around her, to the cold air and the white snow and the distance between the Airstream and the house. “I could probably forgive you for lying, but I can’t forgive you for assuming we would fail.”

A sob rips out of me, but I know I’m not entitled to it. Only one of us gets to be hurt right now, and it’s not me.

“You know, the fucked-up irony is,” Jack says in her too-loud, sandpaper voice, “that you need trust in order to have physical intimacy in a relationship, yet you violated my trust in every imaginable way.”

She turns on her boots in the snow and stomps off toward the Airstream.

I know this time, Jack Kim-Prescott won’t hold onto a drawer of my things.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Sunday, December 25, 2022