But rather than going inside, she came right up to me.
“Hey, Ava,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head and managed a tremulous, teary smile. “I’m fine. I’m just having a bad day.”
Miranda reached out and rubbed my arm “I’m here to talk if you need to. I’ll be right there behind the bar. Anytime.”
I nodded. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Miranda returned my nod and headed inside. I turned to Stephanie.
“I need to get into work. Thank you for coming out here and trying to talk sense into me,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, pulling me in for a hug. “What are best friends for? I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Stephanie went back to her car, and I waited, waving, while she drove away. Thinking about everything she and I had said, I headed into the bar. As soon as I stepped out of the back and into the main part of the building, I saw Miranda standing behind the bar talking to Mason.
My heart felt like it stopped in my chest. I hadn’t even known he was there yet. He looked over at me, and before I could say anything, he stormed past me and out the back door. Miranda rushed toward me with a look of horror on her face.
“What the hell did you do?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought maybe I could help you out,” she said.
I was furious, but something in her face told me the new bartender wasn’t actually trying to stab me in the back. In some twisted, misled way, she was trying to make things easier for me.
Ignoring her, I ran after Mason. As I got out back, I saw Mason behind the wheel of a car I didn’t recognize, pulling out of a parking spot. He wouldn’t stop even as I yelled after him.32MasonI barely even knew the new bartender’s name. Ava told it to me, of course. She’d introduced me to her. At least twice. And yet, the name just went through my brain like a sieve.
Who the fuck cared? Right then, all that mattered to me about her was that she was telling me Ava was pregnant and terrified she was going to lose the baby. I was hearing that my child was growing inside the woman I loved, but not from her. Which also meant I was finding out she had lied straight to my face.
At some point after that, I ended up in my truck driving down the road. My mind went blank. I was on complete autopilot, only thinking about what I’d heard and the music blaring through the speakers. Somewhere at the very edge of my awareness, I knew my phone was ringing, but I had no intention of answering it.
There was nobody I wanted to talk to. Nobody I wanted to hear a single word from. And I didn’t trust myself to talk to anybody, especially Ava.
So, I drove. And drove. And drove. I had no idea where I was going or even how long I had been driving. It wasn’t until it had been dark for a long time and I realized I had been on I-5 for a while that I realized where I was going. And just as the sun was coming up, I got to San Francisco.
I didn’t know why I ended up driving there, or even how I got there. The twelve-hour drive seemed to happen far more quickly. I stopped only once, and the rest of the time was focused squarely on the open road ahead of me.
When I got to California, I went straight to Tom’s house. I stopped in front of it, letting out a breath it felt like I’d been holding since I’d left Oregon. I took out my phone and called my brother.
“I’m sitting outside your house,” I said when he answered.
“You could have let me know you were coming. I would have come and picked you up at the airport,” Tom said.
“I wasn’t at the airport,” I said. “I drove here.”
“You drove to San Francisco from Oregon?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He paused only for a second. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”
He came out to the car like he was expecting me to have luggage he could help carry. Of course, I didn’t. All I had with me was the aftermath of my one stop at an all-night convenience store where I stocked up on every snack food I could find along with several bottles of soda and two massive cups of coffee.
I gathered up all the trash and climbed out of the truck. My body felt tense and sore from sitting in the same position for so long. He walked out toward me, looked in the truck, then put his arm around me and led me inside. He didn’t ask a single question. There was no judgment, no looks.