Chapter One
Zara
I’m so screwed.
The words echoed in my head as I yanked the last of my clothes from the closet and shoved them into my overstuffed suitcase. The zipper fights me, teeth catching on the fabric the same way my heart keeps catching on memories of him.
Of us.
Of the two years I apparently hallucinated.
“We grew apart, Zara. This move was about my career, and I think we both knew things were already fading.”
Fading?
We just got engaged six months ago. He put a ring on my finger and told me I was his future. Then the job offer came, a city twenty-eight hundred miles away from everything I knew, and he asked me to come with him. Promised me we’d build something new together.
Like an idiot, I said yes. Because that’s what people who love each other do, right? They sacrifice. They follow. They believe in the future.
Stupid. So fucking stupid.
I took one last look around the apartment—his apartment, technically, since his name is on the lease—and all I saw were the pieces of a life I tried to assemble out of scraps. The thrift store furniture. The half-dead plant I kept watering, even though itclearly wanted to die. The photo of us at the beach last summer, my head on his shoulder, both of us laughing.
I yanked the picture out of its frame, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash. No point in keeping ghosts.
Everything I owned in this city, which wasnt’t much, now rests inside a suitcase. A few good dresses for work, jeans that are starting to fray at the knees, and the same worn-out sneakers I’ve had since college. My crappy marketing job pays just enough to cover coffee and ramen, but I’ve been living off credit cards and hope. I have no savings. No backup plan. No family to call and say, “I messed up, can I come home?”
Maybe I am just broken in ways that make me impossible to keep. My father left when I was eight—one day he was there, the next he was a ghost with a forwarding address in another state. My mother worked double shifts to keep us afloat and love became something I associated with absence. With waiting. With never being quite enough.
I’ve been chasing that feeling my whole life. Trying to earn affection from men who always had one foot out the door.
And now here I am. Twenty-one years old, homeless, broke, and fresh off another failed attempt at love.
I don’t even have a car. Nathan’s was the only one we used, and he made it very clear I couldn’t keep it. So now I’ll somehow have to take the bus to Marcus’s place in the Lower East Side.
Marcus was my knight in shining armor and also the world’s greatest gay best friend. When I called him crying, he immediately offered me a place on his couch until I could figure things out. Unfortunately for me, he’s on a flight back from London and won’t be home until later tonight. That leaves me with five hours to kill and nowhere to go but a bar.
Great. Just great.
By the time I made it outside, the city was alive with evening traffic, headlights cutting through the gray dusk like veins of gold.
I managed to make my way to the bus stop in a series of awkward, stumbling drags. My arms were now tired from the weight. My sneakers so thin that the sidewalk feels like concrete grinding through the soles.
Twenty minutes later, the bus came. I heaved the suitcase up the steps, fumble for change, and drop into a seat near the back. The driver doesn’t even look at me. To him, I’m probably just another sad girl with luggage and nowhere to go.
The bar Marcus recommended was called The Gilded Cage, and it was just a few blocks from his apartment. It’s in the nicer part of the city, the kind of place with dim lighting and expensive cocktails and a dress code I was probably violating in my worn-out hoodie and leggings. But Marcus said the bartenders don’t judge, and they make a mean margarita. Cheap enough for my budget, too.
Because as if my day wasn’t already rough, I had sixty-three dollars to my name until next payday, which was six days away. Sixty-three dollars for food, transportation, and now alcohol.
Collecting my thoughts, I got off the bus and yanked my bag down beside me. At some point, I passed a couple holding hands outside a steakhouse. She wass laughing at something he said, her head tilted back, her hair catching the light, and I have to force myself to look away.
That feeling must be nice.
I don’t know if I’ve ever truly had that.
I don’t know what love feels like—the real kind, the steady kind, the kind that doesn’t leave. I’ve had glimpses. Hints. Moments where I thought, this is it. But it always fades, like a photograph left in the sun.
Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I sabotage things because I don’t believe I deserve to keep them. Or maybe I just keep picking the wrong men.
