I’d done a lot of terrible things in my life. I had killed without a second thought. I sold drugs to people and made them addicted for life.
But hurting Naelle was easily the worst thing I had ever done.
And it was coming back to haunt me.
I noticed the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from the envelope’s open flap. The envelope wasn’t empty. There was a letter inside.
I didn’t want to read it, but I had to.
I reached for the letter first. I unfolded it.
The words cut me more deeply than a razor blade.
I thought that this was mine, but it’s not.
I dropped it as if it had scorched me.
We were done.
I clutched the center of my chest, but the pain didn’t stop.
I knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to passively accept her ring back. It belonged on her finger. She belonged to me, whether she believed it or not. I’d have to soothe her fears and fix whatever her father had told her about me, but I was willing to go the distance for her.
She was worth it.
Fish Creek
Naelle
TWO MONTHS LATER
I made some tea. The microwave in this tiny cabin looked like it was from 1980, but it still worked.
When I came back to the house, my dad had already arranged to send me to the safest place he could think of: a cabin owned by a buddy of his in the woods in the north part of Wisconsin, what Cheeseheads referred to as Up North.
So here I was, in a small cabin in Door County. I was apparently in a town so small that it was called Fish Creek. I could get groceries, I thought, but when I’d gotten here, the cabin was fully stocked with everything that I would need, as if I needed to be fortified for the zombie apocalypse. The longer that I stayed here, the lower chance I had of having to interact with the outside world.
The only thing I wanted to do was lick my wounds. I’d fallen in love too fast, and now I was paying the price of my stupidity.
Yesterday, I’d pan-fried some of the fish that I found in the fridge. I’d woken up with food poisoning and thrown up in my bathroom, so I had to make tea to settle my stomach.
I wanted ginger ale, though. My mother always insisted on keeping some on hand, except whoever had stocked the cabin hadn’t brought any.
I had a little rental car that I’d driven up from Milwaukee. I was so far north that I was basically in Canada, my cabin was very close to Lake Michigan, and eerily quiet, a little too much like a horror movie for a city girl to be really comfortable.
Up here, I was safely alone, but there wasn’t much to do. I spent a lot of time on Facebook, but doing Castleville quests was already getting really old.
I sighed. Maybe I should go into “town.” They would probably have ginger ale there.
I rinsed out my mouth with some Crest mouthwash before getting dressed. I tied my hair into a sloppy bun, because I just didn’t care. My mother would have a fit if she saw me out of the house with my hair like this, but whatever. There wasn’t really anybody here whose opinion I cared about.
I drove for longer than I wanted to in order to get to the nearest store, a big Woodman’s store.
When I got inside, everything was in disarray. I got the impression that the store stocked just about everything, if you could find it. Sort of like a room which magically produced everything you wanted but made what you wanted the hardest thing to find.
I hunted high and low for ginger ale, but it wasn’t in the soda aisle. I walked through the liquor aisle, and I found it there, even though it was completely nonalcoholic.
I lugged a case of ginger ale — they didn’t have anything smaller — to the register, where the cashier, a girl who was supermodel-tall and gorgeous was chewing gum. She had long, straight blonde hair and high cheekbones. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine. I wondered what she was doing here, in the middle of nowhere.