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“I don’t understand about the phone,” I said after a few moments of silence. “Why did you tell me that your phone was also dead when it was working?”
Russell looked over at me, then down at his sneakers, one of which, I saw now, was untied. “I just…” he said, mostly to his shoes. “I thought that maybe if we were in the same situation, we could just… hang out. I never expected anything like what we had, Darcy. And then you were so great, and we were having so much fun, and I… I shouldn’t have done it,” he said quietly. “And I’m sorry.”
We banked slightly to the right, and suddenly there they were—the lights of Las Vegas. I’d been once before, when my dad had a conference when I was eight. Mostly what I remembered was riding the roller coaster at New York-New York, and the circus-themed hotel we’d stayed at.
But I’d never seen it like this—from the air, the sudden, dazzling brightness of it. We flew past the city, the lights dimming behind us.
“Um—Darcy?” I looked over at Russell, who was twisting his hands together. “Couldn’t it be like the Ship of Theseus? Just like we talked about—the essence stays the same, right? You know something new about me, but the me you met is still the same. Could you maybe think of it like that?”
For half a second, I hesitated. Maybe—if I squinted—I could somehow return to the movie I’d been pretending we were in. But a moment later, I came back to reality. The bubble we were in had burst. I was awake now, and finally seeing things clearly.
“No,” I said, and his face fell. “I was totally open with you—completely honest, and—”
“Really,” he said. He didn’t phrase it like a question. “You don’t seem to want to talk about Stanwich, or why you’re going there. You keep changing the subject. Why?”
I drew back against the seat. “That’s my business,” I said hotly. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about everything—”
“And there it is,” Russell said, pointing at me. “You can be mad at me if you want—I deserve it. But don’t pretend that you were some open book tonight.”
I knew that what he was saying was true, which just made me even more irritated. “Fine,” I said, shaking my head. “Whatever. But we can just drop this, okay? There’s no point.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll talk to this lawyer because I don’t want to get arrested. But then I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll go to the bus station in Vegas and get back home.”
“You can’t just leave. We have to—”
“What?” I snapped. I wished we weren’t still talking about this. It was hard for me to hold on to just how hurt and betrayed I felt when he was looking across at me earnestly, his eyebrows drawn together. But he had lied to me and manipulated me. I’d been vulnerable with him, and had gotten practically naked with him, and had been a heartbeat away from sleeping with him. And the whole time, he had been keeping things from me. I couldn’t let those facts slip away, no matter how regretful he suddenly seemed now. “Why are we even doing this? What’s the point?”
“The point? The point is—we like each other. Right?”
I felt something in my resolve start to crack, and I tried to ignore it. The who cares Darcy of an hour ago was gone. If Russell still thought we were in a story where everything was fated, meant to be, and all worked out in the end, well, that was a him problem.
“This,” I said, gesturing between us, “is done. We don’t need to keep…” I shook my head. “I’ll talk to this lawyer and then I’ll be out of your hair, and we can just pretend this never happened.”
“But I don’t want to do that.”
“Well, I do.”
Russell took a breath, like he was going to say something, but then just sat back against his seat, his dad’s initials emblazoned above his head. He was looking at me like he’d never seen me before, like he didn’t know me—which wasn’t inaccurate. I’d only known him for a handful of hours, after all.
So you were presenting a selective version of yourself, Katy pointed out. Isn’t that what you’re getting mad at him for?
“Wow.”
“What?”
“It’s just—really that black and white with you? All or nothing?”
I wrapped my arms around myself, not loving that he’d pinpointed what Didi and Katy—and my dad—were always saying. I took a breath to respond just as the helicopter seemed to stop. We hovered in the air for a moment, then started to descend.
We touched down, the noise in the cabin lessened, and when Russell took his headphones off, I took mine off too. I ran my hand through my still pool-damp hair, but I knew it was probably a lost cause.
I leaned out the window to try to see where we were just as Scott the pilot opened the door and motioned us out. Russell gestured for me to leave first. This would have charmed me an hour ago, but now it just made me roll my eyes. I ducked my head as I stepped off and walked out, even though it seemed like the propeller blades were slowing way down.
