Page 7 of Rising Heat

I stretch out like a starfish just because I can. Small victories. I’m taking them.

Yesterday feels both blurry and painfully sharp.

My mother cried when I left. The wounded kind of crying that somehow made me feel like I’d committed a personal offense by choosing something she didn’t understand. Twelve hours ago, she stood in the kitchen and folded her arms like disappointment was a posture.

“Boston?” she had said. “Darcy, be serious.”

I kept taping boxes. My fingers shook so badly I had to peel back the first strip and start over.

“It’s not forever.”

“Then what is it?” Her voice had pitched up slightly. “A tantrum? You’re twenty-six, not sixteen.”

I knew she wasn’t right. I also knew that knowing someone isn’t right has never once stopped me from wanting their approval anyway, which is a personality flaw I’m actively workshopping.

My father had been quieter, which was somehow worse. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, shoulders rounded in that way that has always meant keep the peace.

“Your mother’s just worried.”

I laughed out loud at that one, because worried wasn’t the word for what sat on my mother’s face. Worry implied fear for me. What I saw instead looked a lot more like logistics—the quiet calculation already running behind her eyes, the mental guest list rearranging itself, the inevitable book club postmortem on why her daughter had walked away from a man everyone adored.

“I’m not asking for permission.”

The words felt unfamiliar the second they left my mouth, like I’d reached for something that hadn’t belonged to me in a long time.

My mother jerked her head back at that.

“That’s obvious.”

The silence afterward stretched long enough to make my stomach start to turn before my father, gentle as he always is when things go jagged, stepped in.

“Well. You know we’re here if you need anything.”

I nodded, because what was I supposed to say to that? That being there and showing up aren’t the same thing?

I packed the rest of my life into cardboard boxes while Brett conveniently found somewhere else to be. Some stupid, bruised part of me had hoped—just once— he’d show up when it mattered, even if I didn’t actually want him there. That he’d see me carrying boxes full of our shared life out the door or see my side of the closet emptied out and decide I was worth fighting for.

Instead, he texted:

Brett

Let me know if you need the Netflix login.

I sat in my parked car with my forehead against the steering wheel and let out one cracked sound that was almost a laugh. Not the breakup or the ring—the Netflix password.

That was the thing that made it final.

The drive itself is a different story.

I hit the GWB at exactly the wrong time and ended up locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic for so long that the heat in my car malfunctioned and got stuck on nuclear.

Twenty minutes later, at a dead stop on I-95, I was wrestling my way out of my coat and ratty Penn State sweatshirt until I was sitting in leggings and an oversized tee I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually belong to me.

A trucker two lanes over watched the whole thing with the focused appreciation of a man at a buffet. To my own surprise, I stared right back and raised my middle finger. He looked thoroughly shocked for about a second before tipping an imaginary hat.

That made me snort.

I’d spent four years making myself smaller in public spaces, and apparently all it took to break the streak was six hours alone in a car and a minor heating-system failure.