Page 50 of Wreckage and Rain

"Don't call. Don't text every hour. Don't show up at the bookstore with flowers and a speech. Just think."

I walk past him.

At the bedroom door I stop. I don't turn around.

"It's like you don't even know you're losing me, Colt. You're losing me right now."

I drive to Savannah alone. Two hours on I-95 with the windows down and my Coastal Cowgirl playlist on Spotify turned up. Twangy guitar and women singing about leaving men who didn't deserve them. The patron saints of holding it together with sheer will and good winged eyeliner.

***

The signing at the bookstore goes well. The book is doing well. My career is going well. Everything in my life that doesn't involve the man I married is going well. I am clinging to that like a woman in open water clings to a piece of floating wreckage.

Two hundred people in line. Three hours of signing. My hand cramps. My face aches from the smiling. Three hours of it. Behind this table, with a Sharpie in my hand and a reader telling me my book got them through the worst year of their life, I am not Summer Bennet. I am Summer Rain. The words I put into the world matter in a way nobody can take from me.

Not Colt. Not the Bennets. Not Cheyenne fucking Aldrich.

Patricia takes me to dinner after. My publicist. Sixty-two, silver-haired, terrifying. Orders a martini before we've sat down.

"The book is magnificent. Your best. Whatever is feeding this new edge in your writing, don't stop."

"What edge?"

"Anger." She says it like she'd identify a grape varietal. Appreciatively. "Your heroine isn't surviving the plot. She's dismantling it with the energy of a woman who has been underestimated one too many times."

I take a sip of wine. I think about the paragraph I wrote in the guest room at two in the morning. The threat inside the house.

"How's Colt?" Patricia asks.

"Great. Busy."

She nods. Doesn't say anything. Patricia has been married three times. She looks at me like veterans look at recruits.

"Eat your crab cake. And call your friend Autumn."

***

I call Autumn from the hotel.

"How was the signing?"

"Two hundred people."

"And you?"

"Something feels wrong, I feel off."

"Wrong how?"

I try to explain. The feeling isn't specific. Bigger than the fight. Bigger than the birthday. A low-frequency hum in my body that hasn't stopped since I left.

"You know that feeling when you're driving and the car starts pulling to one side? Not enough to swerve. Just enough that you're always correcting. That's what everything feels like right now. Like I'm constantly compensating for a pull I can't see the source of."

"What does your gut say?"

My gut says go home. My gut says don't wait until Monday.

"My gut says go home early."