Page 49 of Roadrunner

“You had too much wine,” he said. Flat tone. No expression.

“That’s not what I meant,” I replied. “What happened.”

He held my gaze a little too long before replying and then smirked. “Nothing you should be ashamed of.”

As if he were an attorney, skirting the question. There was my answer. I didn’t push it any further.

“I need to go home,” I said.

“I’ll get you a car.”

In the car, I stared out the window at the coast. The Pacific was flat and gray and enormous. I thought about the desert. About the way the light hit the mountains in the late afternoon, turning them a soft, impossible blue.

I thought about Riley, and the thinking of him was its own kind of pain, sharper than the headache, sharper than the not-knowing. He was in another state, asleep or awake, unaware that anything about his life had changed overnight.

Some part of me wanted nothing in the world so badly as to be lying in his bed instead of in the back of the car. I wanted it with a physical ache that had nowhere to go. Because the whole point of the last twelve hours, the thing my father had engineered it to accomplish, was to put exactly this much distance between the two of us without either of us choosing it.

I took out my phone and looked at it for a long time. I got as far as his name.

Then I put it away, because I had no idea yet what I would even be calling to say, and some cowardly, self-protective part of me already understood that the not-knowing was easier to carry alone than to hand to him unfinished.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Alex

Then

Three weeks later, I stood in the bathroom of my apartment and stared at a thin pink line.

I sat on the edge of the tub.

The tile was cold.

I looked at the line for a long time. As though giving it enough attention might cause it to change its mind.

It didn’t.

I thought about the hotel room. The ceiling I didn’t recognize. Joshua seated across the room with his jacket on and his shoes on and his practiced expression.

Nothing happened, he’d said.

I turned the test over in my hands.

My first call was to Martina. She answered on the second ring. She listened without interrupting, which was the only kindness I needed and the one she always knew to offer.

When I finished, she was quiet.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Does Riley know?”

“No.”

“Alex—”

“I can’t tell him,” I said. “I can’t walk into his house and tell him that I went to California and woke up in a hotel room I don’t remember entering and now I’m—” I stopped. “He’ll think I cheated.”