Well, best birthday since she left me.
The bourbon burns going down.
Not as much as missing her.
Maybe next year will be the year this finally stops hurting.
CHAPTER THREE
Harper
"Do you want pancakes?"
Emma's voice drifts down the hallway from the kitchen, bright and offensively cheerful for someone who's been conscious for less than twenty minutes. I can already hear the sizzle of the pan.
My roommate is an early riser. The kind of person who wakes up at five, immediately wants food, and can't fathom why the rest of the human race doesn't share her enthusiasm for eggs before the sun's fully committed to the sky.
I, on the other hand, find the thought of eating before nine nauseating. A coffee is all I need. Strong and borderline aggressive, something that has enough caffeine to defrost my brain and drag me into the land of the living.
But today, even coffee feels like a tall order.
I'm lying on my back, staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, and there's a fist of dread sitting right in the center of my stomach. Tonight is my date with Hudson. The word alone makes me want to pull the blanket over my head and not come out until next year.
Is this rock bottom?
"I'm good! Thank you!" I call back and roll over to grab my phone from the nightstand. I’m itching to re-read Ace’s text.
The stomping starts immediately. My bedroom door swings open before I've even unlocked my screen.
"Harper. You have to eat." She leans against the doorframe, spatula in hand, wearing a sports bra and bike shorts like she's about to film content for her fitness page, which she probably is. "You've been quiet since you got home from work last night."
I met Emma during freshman year at UCLA. We were assigned the same dorm, bonded over cheap wine and a shared hatred of our RA, and never looked back. We lived together through undergrad and got this apartment in Echo Park the week after graduation, a two-bedroom with a balcony the size of a bath mat and a view of absolutely nothing, but it was ours. I went into criminal journalism. Emma became a fitness influencer with three hundred thousand followers who worship the ground she lunges on. She teaches the meanest Pilates classes in the city and has an almost religious compulsion to shove protein into everything she tries to feed me. Pancakes included.
"I'm good. I just had a bad day, and today is probably going to be worse."
The spatula drops to her side. She studies my face for a beat, then crosses the room and sinks onto the end of my bed, tucking one leg underneath her.
"You haven't been yourself since you came back from New Falls." Her voice is softer now. "Was going home tough? Did you see him?"
I sit up against the headboard, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks. I need to wake up for this conversation.
She's right. Going home for the first time in nearly six years cracked something open inside me that I thought I'd sealed shut. I thought I could handle it. That I could go there unnoticed, get the information I need, and hide it from my boss.
"It's made me miss home," I tell her, wrapping my arms around myself.
She scoots closer on the mattress. "Miss home, or miss him?"
She was there the night I ended it. She's the one who found me on the bathroom floor of our dorm, mascara running down my face, phone in my hand, hyperventilating so hard I couldn't get a full breath in. She held my hair back while I threw up from crying. She slept in my bed for a week because I couldn't stop shaking. She watched me try to rebuild a life around a hole in my chest that nothing, not work, not time, not distance, has ever been able to fill.
Because that's what losing Ace felt like. Not a breakup. An amputation. Like someone reached inside my ribcage and tore out the half of my soul that knew how to be happy, and I've been walking around with the wound ever since, pretending I'm whole.
Going back to New Falls just ripped it wider. When I met Hunter's new wife, Lola, I couldn’t help but be jealous of her. That she gets to live the life I once dreamed of. Not with Hunter, with Ace. Being a Sterling was the dream I let go of. I let the entire town throw me a big send-off party to start my new life and follow these big career goals I had. But our long-distance love got too real. The moment he told me he was about to throw everything away for me, I lost it and made the stupidest decision of my life. I couldn’t drag him down with me, and I’m still glad I didn’t.
Everyone believed in me, and I couldn’t let them down by giving up and coming home. The embarrassment would kill me. Even Ace wanted me to succeed. So I stayed here. I studied hardand started working at LA Press. But something has always been missing. That spark. That love. It died the day I broke up with Ace, and it never returned, no matter what I tried.
"Both," I whisper, and my voice cracks on the word.
Emma doesn't flinch. She never does.
