Chapter Text
It was Thursday.
Rey stood in the kitchen with her hands flat on the countertop, fingers spread wide, pressing down so hard her knuckles had gone white. The granite was cold. Everything was cold.
The evidence was on the counter in front of her.
His phone. His second phone. The one he kept in the inside pocket of his sport coat, the one she had found two days ago when she was looking for a receipt for the plumber. She had not been snooping. She had been looking for a receipt, and she had found a phone she had never seen before, and she had turned it on, and the lock screen was a photograph of a woman's bare shoulder.
Not Rey's shoulder.
She had spent forty-eight hours with that phone. She had charged it. She had sat on the bathroom floor with her back against the tub and scrolled through everything. Messages. Photos. Hotel confirmations. Dinner reservations. A shared calendar. A shared calendar, color-coded, which meant someone had sat down and planned around Rey's schedule, around Poe's schedule, around the life he was living in plain sight.
The messages went back twelve months.
Twelve.
Not a slip. Not a weekend in Vegas. Not a drunken mistake at a conference that he regretted immediately and confessed the next morning with tears in his eyes.
A year.
An entire year of someone else's hands on his body. An entire year of "I miss you" texts sent from the other room while Rey washed dishes ten feet away. An entire year of hotel rooms booked on company cards that Rey would never see because she didn't review the firm's expenses, because why would she, because she trusted him, because that was the whole arrangement, wasn't it—she trusted and he was trusted and that was the deal.
The woman's name was Jessika. Jessika Tavo. She worked at Poe's firm. She was his assistant. She had been his assistant for three years.
Rey knew her.
Not well. But she had met her. More than once. At the firm's Christmas party last December, Jessika had been the one who organized the secret Santa, and Rey had drawn her name and bought her a nice candle, and Jessika had opened it and smiled and said, "You didn't have to do that, Rey, but thank you, that's really sweet." And Rey had smiled back and said, "It's Christmas, you have to get something," and they had chatted for five minutes about the catering, and Rey had liked her.
She had liked her.
In September, when Poe was working late on the Morrison deposition, Rey had stopped by the office with takeout. Two containers of pad thai. She had walked in and Jessika was at her desk outside Poe's office, and Jessika had looked tired, and Rey had said, "He's still going?" and Jessika had said, "He's been at it since seven this morning," and Rey had said, "Here," and handed her one of the containers. "You look like you need this more than he does."
Jessika had laughed. Taken the food. Said, "You're a saint, Rey."
Rey had driven home that night thinking about how nice Poe's assistant was. How she should remember to do something for her at Christmas. How hard it must be to work for someone as demanding as Poe, and wasn't it lucky that Jessika was so patient, so competent, so—
She understood now what "working late" meant.
She understood what "patient" meant.
She understood what the look on Jessika's face had been when Rey handed her that takeout, and it was not gratitude. It was guilt. Or maybe it wasn't guilt. Maybe it was something worse. Maybe it was amusement. Maybe Jessika had gone home that night and told someone, or maybe she had told Poe, and maybe they had laughed about it, about the girlfriend bringing dinner to the woman Poe was sleeping with, and—
Rey pressed harder on the countertop.
The front door opened.
Poe came in wet. Rain in his hair, rain on his jacket, rain on his shoes. He had been at the office—he was always at the office—and he shook off his umbrella in the hallway and set his briefcase down and called out, "Hey, I'm home," in that voice he used, the one that was warm and easy and made you feel like everything was fine, everything was always fine, Poe Dameron was home and that meant the world was operating the way it was supposed to.
He came into the kitchen.
He saw her face.
He stopped.
For a moment—maybe two seconds, maybe three—they just looked at each other across the kitchen. The rain hammered the windows. The refrigerator hummed. His phone, his real phone, the one she had not touched, buzzed in his pocket.
"How long?"
Poe's eyes moved. Down to the counter. To his second phone sitting next to her hand. His jaw tightened, just slightly, just enough that most people wouldn't notice, but Rey had been with this man for six years and she noticed everything about his face, every micro-expression, every twitch, because she had spent six years learning to read him the way you learn to read weather patterns when you live somewhere that storms.
He didn't say: What's that?
He didn't say: Rey, I can explain.
He didn't say: It's not what you think.
"What did she tell you?" Poe, replied.
Wrong answer.
So wrong that Rey almost laughed. Almost. What she actually did was blink, slowly, and feel something shift behind her ribs, something tectonic, something that had been holding steady for two days while she read through a year of messages and finally cracked.
"She didn't tell me anything," Rey said. "I found your phone."
Poe's face changed. Not dramatically. He was a lawyer. He controlled his face the way other people controlled their breathing—automatically, unconsciously, constantly. But she saw the calculation. She saw him running through scenarios, trying to figure out exactly what she had seen, how much she knew, what she could prove.
"A year," Rey said.
He was quiet for three seconds. Four. Five.
"Yes. Eleven months. Roughly."
"Roughly."
"Rey—"
"Don't." Her voice was steady. She did not feel steady. She felt like she was standing on a fault line. "Don't say my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're calming a client."
He exhaled. He rubbed his jaw. He looked at the floor, then at the window, then at her. "I know this looks bad."
"It looks like you've been fucking your assistant for a year."
"It wasn't—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "That's not what I—"
"That's not what you said? That's not what you meant? That's not what it was?" Rey's voice was climbing. She could feel it climbing and she couldn't stop it. "Which one, Poe? Which linguistic distinction are you going to hide behind tonight?"
"It wasn't a relationship," he said, and he said it carefully, the way you say something when you know it's going to make things worse but you've decided it's strategically important. "It was—"
"Don't." She pointed at him. Her hand was shaking. "Don't you dare tell me what it wasn't. You fucked her for a year. You have a second phone. You have a shared calendar. You booked hotel rooms. You took her to dinner. You told her you loved her—"
"I didn't—"
"October fourteenth. 'I love you. I wish I was with you right now.' That's what you texted her. October fourteenth. We were in Asheville that weekend. We were at the Biltmore. You were standing next to me in the garden and you were texting her that you loved her."
Poe closed his eyes.
"Did you fuck her in our bed?"
Silence.
"Did you bring her here?"
"Rey—"
"Did you bring her into this apartment? Into this kitchen? Into our bed?"
"No." He opened his eyes. "Never here. I swear to God, Rey, never here."
"But everywhere else."
He didn't answer.
"She knew you had a girlfriend."
"Yes."
"And she was okay with that."
"It was... complicated."
"Complicated." Rey laughed. The sound was ugly. She hated it. "Did you tell her you were going to leave me?"
Poe's silence was different this time. It wasn't strategic. It was the silence of a man who had just realized how deep the hole was.
"Did you tell her you were going to leave me, Poe?"
"...Yes."
"When?"
"Last spring. I—"
"Last spring. So within months of starting to fuck her, you were already promising to leave me. And then what? You just forgot? You kept promising and kept not doing it and kept fucking her and kept coming home to me and—what was the plan? Were you going to keep both of us forever? Were you going to wait until one of us got tired and left so you didn't have to be the one who did it?"
"I was trying to figure out how to—"
"To what?"
"How to handle it. How to do the right thing."
"The right thing." Rey's voice cracked. She felt it crack and she hated it, hated that he could hear it, hated that he could see what he had done to her. "You were trying to figure out how to do the right thing for months? For a year? The right thing was to not fuck your assistant. The right thing was to not lie to me every day for twelve months. The right thing was to not text another woman that you loved her while you were standing next to me in a fucking rose garden—"
"Rey, sit down."
"Don't tell me to sit down."
"You're getting hysterical."
She glared at him.
Not because it was unexpected—she had heard him use it before, in smaller arguments, in disagreements where he wanted to establish that he was calm and she was not, that he was rational and she was emotional, that his position was the reasonable one and hers was the product of a woman who couldn't control herself—but because she recognized it. She recognized the move. She had always recognized it. She just hadn't let herself name it.
"I'm not hysterical," she said. "I'm angry. There's a difference."
"You're shaking."
"I'm angry and I'm shaking. That's allowed. You don't get to tell me how to feel about this."
Poe held up his hands. Surrender posture. I'm not the enemy here. "Okay. Okay. You're right. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
"You shouldn't have done a lot of things."
"You're right." He leaned forward. "You're right, Rey. I know you're right. I know what I did was wrong. I've known for months. I've been trying to figure out how to tell you—"
"Congratulations on your struggle."
"—I didn't want to hurt you."
"You've been fucking another woman for a year and you didn't want to hurt me?"
"I didn't want it to end like this."
"How did you want it to end, Poe? With me never finding out? With you quietly ending it with her and us just... continuing? Living in this apartment? Going to your firm's Christmas party? Me bringing takeout to your office and handing it to the woman you were sleeping with and not knowing? Is that how you wanted it to end?"
"I wanted—" He stopped. Ran his hand through his wet hair. "I wanted to fix it. I wanted to end it with Jess and come clean when the timing was better."
"When the timing was better?"
"We were in the middle of the Morrison case. The Hartley settlement. I couldn't—"
"You couldn't what? You couldn't break up with your girlfriend while you had a big case at work? You couldn't stop cheating on me while your billable hours were too high?"
"That's not what I—You think I wanted this?" he said, and his voice changed. It went from conciliatory to wounded, and Rey stared at him because she could not believe what she was hearing. "You think this is what I wanted? You think I wanted to be in this situation?"
"What situation, Poe? The situation where you got caught?"
"The situation where I'm in love with two women and I'm hurting both of them—"
"You're not in love with two women."
"I—"
"You're in love with yourself. You're in love with the version of yourself that gets to have a girlfriend at home and a woman at the office and everyone telling you how great you are. That's what you're in love with. Don't dress it up as a tragedy."
Poe's face hardened. The mask slipped, just for a second, and she saw something underneath—the real Poe, the one who didn't perform, the one who was cold and calculating and genuinely believed he was the most important person in every room he entered.
"You haven't been happy either," he said.
The words landed like a punch to the sternum.
"Excuse me?"
"We've been having problems, Rey. You know we have. You've been distant. You're always working. You come home and you're tired and you don't want to talk and you don't want to go out and you don't want to do anything—"
"I don't want to do anything?"
"—we stopped having fun. We stopped being spontaneous. When was the last time we went somewhere just because? When was the last time you suggested something that wasn't planned three weeks in advance?"
Rey's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat on the counter again. The granite was still cold. She focused on the cold.
"I stopped being spontaneous," she repeated slowly. "I stopped being fun."
"Yes."
"And that's why you fucked your assistant."
"I didn't say that—"
"You just said—"
"I said we were having problems. I said I was unhappy. I'm not blaming you, Rey, I'm saying the relationship was already—"
"You were controlling....but I was the problem?" Rey hisses.
"Name one thing I controlled?" Poe asked.
"Camping." She didn't wait. "I stopped camping because you hated it. You hated the dirt. You hated the bugs. You hated sleeping on the ground. You hated that there was no cell service. You hated that it was 'a waste of a weekend.' You hated that I came back with scratches on my legs and smelled like campfire. You hated it, so I stopped."
"Rey—"
"Hiking. I stopped hiking because you said it was dangerous to go alone and you refused to come with me and you made me feel guilty for wanting to do something without you. Weekend trips. I stopped taking weekend trips because every time I suggested going somewhere, you said, 'Why would you want to disappear into the woods when we barely see each other?' As if I was abandoning you. As if wanting one weekend to myself was some kind of betrayal."
She pushed off the counter. She was pacing now. She couldn't stop.
"My job. Every time I had a work trip, you said, 'It's strange they need you there.' Every time I stayed late, you said, 'You could've texted.' Every time I made a friend at work, you asked questions about them. Not because you were interested. Because you wanted to know if there was something to worry about. You wanted me to account for my time. You wanted me to account for my self."
"That's not—"
"But when you worked until midnight? Your career was demanding. When you went on business trips? That was just how it worked. When you came home late and didn't text? I was supposed to understand. I was supposed to be supportive."
She turned on him. "I made myself smaller for you, Poe. I stopped doing the things I loved because you made them feel like failures. I stopped going to the places that made me happy because you made me feel guilty for being happy without you. I changed my entire life to fit into yours, and now you're standing in my kitchen telling me I became boring?"
"I didn't say boring—"
"You said we stopped having fun. You said I wasn't spontaneous. You said I was distant. You said the relationship was already broken. And maybe it was. But you broke it. You broke it by making me think that who I was wasn't enough. And then you went and found someone else and you're trying to tell me that my distance is what drove you to it?"
"I'm saying the relationship was already—"
"You could have left."
Poe stopped.
"You could have left," Rey said again. "If you were so unhappy. If I was so distant. If the relationship was so broken. You could have ended it. You could have sat me down and said, 'Rey, I'm not happy, I want to see other people, I think we should break up.' And it would have hurt. It would have hurt like hell. But it would have been honest. And I would have survived it. But you didn't do that because you didn't want to be the bad guy. You wanted to keep me. You wanted to keep her. You wanted everything and you didn't care who paid for it."
Poe was quiet for a long time. She thought maybe—maybe—he was going to say something real. Something honest. Something that acknowledged what he'd done without trying to reframe it, without trying to manage her reaction, without trying to make himself the victim of a situation he had engineered from the first text to the last.
But Poe Dameron didn't say things that were honest. Poe Dameron said things that were strategic.
"You want to know why I went to someone else?" he said, and his voice was different now. Quieter. The voice he used when he was about to say something he knew would hurt. The voice he used when he wanted you to feel small. "Really? You want to have that conversation?"
Rey didn't answer. She couldn't. Something in his tone had locked her throat.
"Because it wasn't just about fun, Rey. It was about us. You and me. And I'm not talking about hiking or camping or weekend trips. I'm talking about what happened—or what didn't happen—when we were in this apartment. Together. At night."
She felt the blood leave her face.
"Don't," she said.
"When was the last time you actually wanted me?" He leaned back in the chair. Crossed his arms. The deposition posture was gone. This was something else. Something crueler. "Because I can tell you exactly when it stopped. About fourteen months ago. Right around the time you started coming home from work exhausted every single night. Right around the time I'd reach for you in bed and you'd roll over. Right around the time 'not tonight' became every night."
"That's not—"
"Every night, Rey. For months. I'd try. I'd touch you. I'd kiss you. And it was always 'I'm tired' or 'I have a headache' or 'I have to be up early.' Do you know what that does to someone? Do you know what it feels like to be rejected by your own girlfriend in your own bed night after night after—"
"So you fucked someone else because I was tired?"
Poe flinched. Actually flinched, physically, like she had thrown something at him.
"That's not what I—"
"You fucked your assistant because your girlfriend wouldn't put out enough? Is that what you're telling me right now? Is that really the defense you're going with?"
"I'm saying the intimacy was gone—"
"The intimacy was gone?" Her voice cracked wide open. She couldn't control it anymore. She didn't want to control it. "I was exhausted, Poe! I was working fifty hours a week and then coming home and cooking and cleaning and doing your laundry because you couldn't be bothered to separate the darks from the lights and you wanted me to want you? You wanted me to come home dead on my feet and just—what—spread my legs because you tapped me on the shoulder?"
"See, this is what you do." His voice was sharp now. Cutting. "This is exactly what you do. You take everything and make it extreme. I didn't say anything like that. I said I felt unwanted. I said I felt rejected. I said I felt like you didn't want me anymore. And you know what? You didn't. You didn't want me. You stopped wanting me a long time ago and you never had the decency to say it to my face."
"Maybe I stopped wanting you because you made me miserable!"
The words were out before she could stop them. They hung in the air. Both of them heard them. Both of them felt them.
Poe's jaw tightened. "There it is."
"No—"
"No, that's fine. That's good to know. I made you miserable. The man who paid for this apartment, who paid for your car, who supported you when you wanted to switch jobs, who—"
"I pay for this apartment! My name is on the lease! And I never asked you to pay for my car, you did that because you wanted me to owe you, you wanted me to need you, everything you ever did for me came with strings attached and I didn't see it because I was too busy trying to be the girlfriend you wanted—"
"The girlfriend I wanted?" He laughed. Short. Bitter. "Rey, I would have been happy with a girlfriend who touched me once in a while."
"Maybe if you were worth touching!"
Silence. Brutal silence. She saw it hit him. She saw the exact moment it landed and she didn't care. She didn't care that it was cruel. She didn't care that it was low. She was past caring. She was so far past caring that she could feel the distance between who she had been ten minutes ago and who she was now like a physical space, a canyon, a gap she couldn't bridge even if she wanted to.
Poe's face went white. Then red. Then he smiled. Not a real smile. The kind of smile a person deploys when they've been hurt and want you to know they've been hurt and want you to feel guilty about it.
"Well," he said. "At least I know how you really feel."
"Don't you dare—"
"No, it's fine. It's good. This is good. Now I know. I wasn't enough for you. I was never enough for you. That's what this is about, isn't it? Not the cheating. Not the lying. You're angry because you already checked out and I had the audacity to check out too."
"I did not—"
"You just said I made you miserable. You just said I wasn't worth touching. What am I supposed to take from that, Rey? That you were sitting here pining for me? That you were desperate for my attention? You weren't. You were here. Going through the motions. Doing the bare minimum. And I was supposed to just—what? Live like that? Be a monk? Be grateful for whatever scraps you threw me?"
"Scraps?" She was screaming now. She didn't care. "You want to talk about scraps? I gave you everything. I gave you my time. I gave you my interests. I gave you my weekends and my friendships and the things that made me me and you stood there and took them and took them and took them and then told me I wasn't giving enough? You wanted my body too? On top of everything else? You wanted me to fuck you on demand when I was so tired I could barely stand?"
"On demand?"
"Every time you touched me it felt like an obligation, Poe! Every time you reached for me in bed I felt like I was paying rent! And you want to stand there and tell me that I'm the reason you stuck your dick in someone else?"
"I'm saying that when you shut someone out—"
"I didn't shut you out! I was dying! I was working myself into the ground and coming home to a man who criticized everything I did and I was supposed to feel sexy? I was supposed to feel desired? You never made me feel desired, Poe! You made me feel guilty! Every time I said no you made me feel like I was failing you! Like my body was something you were owed and I was withholding it!"
"I never said you owed me anything—"
"You didn't have to say it! You showed it! Every sigh. Every time you rolled over and faced the wall. Every time you got up the next morning and didn't speak to me. Every time you made sure I knew that I had disappointed you. You punished me for saying no. You punished me. And now you're standing here telling me that you cheated because I wouldn't put out enough?"
"I cheated because I was lonely in my own relationship!"
"You were lonely?" She grabbed the mug—the blue one, the handmade one from the farmer's market, the one with the uneven rim he'd called "charmingly defective"—and she threw it. Not at him. At the wall behind him. It shattered. Coffee splattered the cabinets. The pieces hit the floor and skittered across the tile and the sound was enormous and ugly and she didn't care. "You were lonely? I was lonely for years and I didn't go find someone else! I was lonely and I stayed and I tried and I changed myself and you were out there telling another woman you loved her!"
"Rey—"
"Did you mean it?"
Poe looked at the broken mug on the floor. Then at the wall. Then at her. "I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't know what I felt. I was confused. I was—"
"You were confused. You were confused." She was crying now. She hadn't wanted to. She had told herself she wouldn't. She had spent two days on that bathroom floor telling herself that when the moment came she would be strong, she would be composed, she would be the one in control. But her body betrayed her the way his body had betrayed her, and the tears came and she couldn't stop them and she hated him for that too. She hated him for making her cry. She hated him for seeing her cry. She hated him for every tear because he would use them. He would see them and later he would tell someone—Marcus, his therapist, whoever—that she had been emotional, that she had been hysterical, that she had thrown things and screamed and cried and he had been the calm one, the reasonable one, the one who tried.
"Did you buy her things with our money? Did you take her to restaurants I wanted to go to? Did you do things with her that you wouldn't do with me because I was too tired or too boring or too broken to be worth the effort?"
Poe didn't answer.
"Did you?"
"Some of it. Yes."
"What things?"
"Rey, I don't think—"
"What things?"
"Dinners. Trips. I took her to Charleston for a weekend in June."
Charleston. Rey had asked to go to Charleston. She had asked Poe three times. She had found a bed and breakfast, she had shown him the website, she had said, "Let's go for our anniversary." And each time he had said, "I can't, I have the Morrison case, maybe in the fall." And she had accepted it. She had accepted it because that's what she did. She accepted. She accommodated. She made herself smaller.
He had taken Jessika to Charleston in June.
Rey sat down. Not in a chair. On the floor. Her legs just gave out. She sat on the kitchen tile with her back against the cabinet and her hands in her lap and she stared at the broken mug and the coffee and the rain on the windows and she felt something inside her go quiet. Not calm. Not peaceful. Just... done. Something was done.
"Rey." Poe's voice was gentle now. Gentle the way it got when he thought he was winning. "Rey, get up. Come on. Let's sit at the table and talk about this."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"There's a lot to talk about. We can figure this out. We can go to counseling. I'll end it with Jess. I'll end it tonight. I'll call her in front of you if you want. We can—"
"You'll end it tonight."
"Yes."
"Like you ended it last spring when you told her you were going to leave me?"
He stopped.
"How many times did you tell her it was over, Poe? How many times did you tell her you were choosing me? And then came back to this apartment and ate dinner with me and went to bed with me and got up the next morning and texted her that you missed her?"
"I—"
"Was it a game? Was I the game? Was she the game? Were we both just—positions? Options? Things you kept on the board in case you needed them?"
"You're not an option, Rey. You're—"
"What am I, Poe? What am I to you? Because I've been trying to figure that out for two days and I can't. I can't figure out what I was to you. Was I the girlfriend you kept at home? The one you brought to firm parties? The one who brought takeout to your office and made you look stable and successful and normal? The one who made you look like a man who had his life together?"
"You were my girlfriend. You are my girlfriend. This isn't—"
"I was a prop."
"Rey—"
"I was a prop. I was the thing that made you look good. The girlfriend. The apartment. The life. It was all just—set dressing. And behind the set, you had a whole other life. A whole other woman. A whole other calendar. And I was standing in the kitchen handing her pad thai and calling her patient and competent and I didn't know. I didn't know because you made sure I didn't know. You managed me. You managed me the way you manage your cases. You managed me the way you manage everything."
"That's not—"
"Every time I wanted to go somewhere, you made me feel guilty. Every time I wanted to do something without you, you made me feel like I was abandoning you. Every time I had a life outside this apartment, you found a way to shrink it. You shrunk my life, Poe. You shrunk it until there was nothing left but you. And then you went and found someone else because I was—what? Not enough anymore? Not interesting enough? Not available enough? You took everything and it still wasn't enough and you went and got more."
Poe stood up from the chair. He took a step toward her. "Rey, I love you."
"Don't."
"I love you. I know I hurt you. I know I ruined this. But I love you and I want to fix it and I will do whatever—"
"You will do whatever it takes to not lose. That's not the same thing."
He stopped.
"You don't want to fix this because you love me. You want to fix this because you don't want to be the guy who got caught. You don't want to be the bad guy. You want to go to counseling and say the right things and cry in the right sessions and then come home and tell everyone we're working on it and six months from now you'll be texting someone else because I'll still be too tired and you'll still be too entitled and nothing will have changed because you don't think you did anything wrong."
"I think I did something wrong. I know I did something wrong."
"You know you got caught. That's what you know."
Poe's face changed. The softness was gone. The gentle, loving, let me fix this mask dropped and what was underneath was cold and sharp and real. This was the Poe that opposing counsel saw in courtrooms. This was the Poe that depositions were afraid of.
"You're seriously throwing away six years over this?"
"Over this? Over you lying to me every day for a year? Over you sleeping with someone I know, someone I liked, someone I brought food to while you were fucking her? Over you telling her you loved her? Over you promising to leave me? Over a second phone and a shared calendar and a year of hotel rooms that I paid for, Poe, because every time you said the firm was covering it, I believed you, and I bet some of those charges ended up on joint expenses, didn't they? Didn't they?"
He didn't answer.
"Get out."
"Rey—"
"Get out of my apartment."
"This is our apartment."
"My name is on the lease. My name is on everything. You kept your secrets on a separate phone so I wouldn't find them, and I found them, and now I want you out."
Poe stood. He straightened his jacket. He picked up his briefcase. He walked to the door with the measured steps of a man who wanted her to know he was leaving on his own terms, that this was a strategic retreat and not a defeat.
At the door, he turned. "You'll change your mind."
"Get out."
"You always calm down. You always come around. You'll call me tomorrow."
"Get out, Poe."
He left.
Rey sat on the kitchen floor for a long time.
The mug was in three pieces on the tile. Coffee was spreading in a slow dark pool toward the cabinet. She didn't pick it up. She didn't move. She sat with her back against the cabinet and her hands in her lap and she stared at the broken mug and the coffee and the rain and she felt hollowed out. Gutted. Like someone had reached inside her and scooped out everything that was supposed to be there and left only the shell.
Her phone was on the counter above her. It buzzed.
Buzzed. Buzzed. Buzzed.
She reached up. Her hand found the phone. She pulled it down to the floor with her and read the messages and the tears came again, not because of what they said but because of what they were—more management, more control, more of Poe trying to shape the narrative even from Marcus's guest room, even after everything. He wasn't apologizing. He was positioning. Every text was a deposition question. Every message was designed to make her respond, to make her engage, to keep the conversation going so he could eventually steer it back to let's work on this.
She did not block him. She wanted to. She wanted to tap the button and erase him from her device, from her contacts, from her life, but her thumb hovered over the screen and she couldn't make herself do it, and she hated herself for that, hated that even now, even after everything, some part of her was still waiting for him to say the right thing, the thing that would make it make sense, the magic words that would undo a year of betrayal.
He didn't say the right thing.
He said: I'll stay at Marcus's tonight. We can talk tomorrow.
And then: I'm sorry.
And then: I really am sorry, Rey.
And then, a minute later: You know I'm not a bad person.
She turned the phone face-down on the tile beside her.
You know I'm not a bad person.
As if that was the point. As if being "not bad" was the standard. As if the baseline for a relationship was he didn't hit you and he only cheated for a year and he only lied every day and he only made you smaller and he only blamed you for his dick finding someone else but hey, he's not a bad person.
The kitchen was wrecked. The chair was pushed out at an angle where Poe had sat. The mug was on the floor. The coffee was still spreading. His second phone was on the counter next to hers, two devices side by side, one full of lies and one full of messages she couldn't bring herself to read.
She looked at the counter.
There was a magazine proof next to the stove. She had brought it home from work two days ago—an article about a section of the Appalachian Trail that ran through the Smokies, through elevation and fog and old-growth forest, through places where the ridgelines went on for miles and the only sound was wind and birdsong and your own breathing. She was supposed to edit it this week. Check the facts. Tighten the prose. Make sure the author hadn't confused rhododendron with mountain laurel.
The cover photograph was a panorama. Blue ridges fading into gray. The trail cutting through the foreground like a seam.
She stared at it.
She used to do that.
She used to drive to the trailhead before dawn and hike until her legs burned and her lungs ached and the world below looked like something she could hold in her hands. She used to sleep in a tent so small her feet stuck out the bottom. She used to wake up with frost on the fly and cook oatmeal on a camp stove and eat it watching the sun come up over a valley so green it didn't look real.
She used to know who she was.
Before Poe.
Before she made herself smaller.
Before she traded the mountains for hotel rooms and the trail for restaurants and the wilderness for city breaks and called it growing up, called it compromise, called it love.
Rey got up off the floor. She stepped over the broken mug. She walked down the hallway to the bedroom, and she didn't turn on the light because she didn't need to, because she knew this room, she knew every corner of it, and right now she wanted to move through it in the dark, by feel, the way you move through a tent at night when you don't want to wake anyone.
The closet was open. She reached for the top shelf—past the shoebox, past the winter scarf Poe had bought her, past the stack of hotel keycards she had saved like souvenirs from trips that weren't even hers—and her hand found the strap.
Her old pack.
She pulled it down. It was dusty. The nylon was faded. One of the buckles was slightly bent from the time she had sat on it during a river crossing in Shenandoah and the current had flipped her sideways. It still smelled like campfire and pine, or maybe she was imagining that, maybe she wanted it to, maybe the smell was just the ghost of a smell, the memory of something she used to love.
She set the pack on the bed.
Then she opened the dresser.
She didn't pack carefully. She didn't fold. She grabbed handfuls of things—underwear, socks, sports bras, the long-sleeve thermal she wore on cold mornings, the fleece that had a tear in the left pocket from a branch on the AT that she had never bothered to fix because the tear was a memory and she wanted to keep it. She shoved them into the pack. She went to the bathroom. Toothbrush. Hair ties. The small bottle of sunscreen she kept in the medicine cabinet. A box of bandages, because her feet always blistered on the first day and she had learned that lesson years ago on a ridge in Georgia when she had to walk six miles on raw skin.
Back to the bedroom. The wool socks. The hiking pants. The rain shell—the good one, the Gore-Tex, the one that could take a downpour and keep her dry. She had bought it with her own money before Poe, before the apartment, before the life that was currently in pieces on the kitchen floor next to a broken mug.
She found her base layers in the bottom drawer. They were rolled tight, the way she used to pack them, and when she unrolled the top one, something fell out. A receipt. From a gas station in Damascus, Virginia. Eight years old. She had stopped there on her way to the trailhead, bought coffee and a granola bar and a map, and the cashier had asked her if she was thru-hiking and she had said, "No, just a section," and he had said, "That's how it starts," and she had laughed.
She put the receipt back in the drawer.
She packed the base layers.
Her hiking boots were by the front door. She had kept them there even after she stopped hiking, even after Poe asked why she didn't just put them in storage, even after they became just another pair of shoes in a row of shoes that included heels she never wore and loafers that belonged to a man who was currently at his friend Marcus's apartment sending her messages she couldn't bring herself to read.
She picked them up. They were scuffed. The laces were frayed. The soles still had red clay on them from the last trip—where had it been? Mount Rogers? Grayson Highlands? She remembered the wild ponies, the way they stood in the trail like they owned it, the way she had stood there waiting for one to move and it had looked at her with an expression that said you go around.
She put the boots in the pack. They fit. They had always fit. They fit the way things fit that were made for you, that were chosen for your body and your stride and the way you walked through the world.
She went back to the kitchen.
She found the magazine proof. She folded it and put it in the side pocket of the pack where she used to keep her map. She found her Swiss Army knife in the junk drawer. Her headlamp, dead batteries and all, was on top of the refrigerator where she had put it two years ago when she cleaned out the hall closet and told herself she was just organizing, not retiring.
The pack was heavy when she lifted it. Not too heavy. The right heavy. The heavy that meant you had what you needed and nothing you didn't.
She stood in the kitchen with the pack on her shoulders and looked at the broken mug and the coffee on the floor and the phone face-down on the tile and the rain on the windows and the empty chair where Poe had sat and said you're getting hysterical and we'll talk when you've calmed down and you're seriously throwing away six years and you'll change your mind and you know I'm not a bad person.
She wouldn't change her mind.
She was going to find the trail again.
She was going to remember who she was before him, before the shrinking, before the year of lies and the second phone and the woman she had brought dinner to in September like a saint, like a fool, like a girlfriend who didn't know she was already gone.