Page 63 of Wreckage and Rain

I can finally let go. There is no one I need to manage the expectations of, or hold it together for. I am alone in this space, and I cry. Not the pretty kind. I cry until my ribs hurt. Until my eyes swell shut. Until the sound coming out of me doesn't sound like me anymore. Sounds like an animal deciding whether to die or fight.

I fight.

I don't know when the crying stops. An hour. Two. Eventually my body just quits. The grief isn't finished. I am.

I lie on the floor, stare at the ceiling and breathe.

I am alive. I am in Chicago. I am alone.

For the first time in eight years, no one is expecting me to be anywhere or be anything or perform any version of myself for anyone.

The freedom is so big it almost breaks me again.

***

Two weeks.

I build a routine. One thing, then the next thing. It is how I get through each moment.

I learn to start the days with coffee and the cursor. I have a manuscript due. The work doesn't care about catastrophe. The page is blank and the story needs telling regardless of whether the person telling it is whole.

I write. And it's good. The anger that's been living in my chest since that night pours onto the page like accelerant. Every scene catches fire. My heroine is sharper. My villain is more insidious. The betrayal at the center of the plot feels real in a way my previous books didn't, because I'm not imagining anymore. Iknow what it tastes like. I know how it feels. I know what it is like to have someone make me feel like I'm crazy for seeing something that only exists in my gut. My gut wasn't wrong.

I walk in the afternoons. Chicago is a city built for walking. The lake and the riverfront. The neighborhoods. The architecture changing every few blocks like the city is trying on personalities. I walk until my legs ache and my brain goes quiet. I spend a lot of time just sitting at Buckingham fountain.

I don't call Colt. He's tried. Calls, texts, emails. Blocked. All of it. His voice is a weapon and I am not armored enough.

I text my parents every day. I'm safe. I love you. Daddy texts back: Love you, baby girl. Mama calls twice a week and we talk about new recipes and weather and the diner. We don't talk about Colt.

Jake sends memes. A pelican so ugly it looks personally offended. Caption: this is how you described Colt at prom and I never forgot. I laugh for the first time in two weeks and it hurts my face.

Autumn calls every night. She talks. I listen. She keeps me distracted. She talks about her job, her dating life. A pigeon on her fire escape. She doesn't ask me questions. She fills the silence with her voice because the alternative is letting me sit in it alone, and Autumn Hayes has never allowed that. She wants to come see me, she begs me to let her blow in like the hurricane that she is and carry me through this. I ask her to give me more time.

***

Three weeks pass before something in the city catches me. An evening at blue hour, I'm walking down Milwaukee Avenue when the city shifts from day to night, and I see the sign.

Art deco lettering. Warm gold backlight.

VIBES.

Below it, smaller: Burlesque. Cabaret. The Art of Being Seen.

The Art of Being Seen.

I stop. People flow around me. Chicago doesn't slow down for a woman working something out. But I stand there and something happens in my chest that I haven't felt in weeks. Not happiness. Not hope. Something quieter. Recognition. The sign is speaking a language I forgot I knew.

I go in.

It's beautiful. Intimate. Maybe two hundred seats arranged in a half-moon around a stage draped in velvet. Low light. Exposed brick. A bar along the back wall staffed by a man with dark hair and a black t-shirt. Every inch of him that shows is covered in ink. He polishes the glasses with the unhurried precision of someone who's done this ten thousand times and still gives a shit.

The show starts.

The first performer takes the stage and I forget to be devastated.

She's tall. Dark-skinned. Corset, thigh-highs and an expression that could melt rebar. She moves with a power that isn't only about sex. It's about ownership. She owns every inch of her body, every roll of her hips, every arch of her spine. She is performing for herself and we are privileged to witness it.

I watch her and something old in me wakes up. The memory of what it felt like to exist in my own skin without apology, before the Bennets, before the galas, before I learned to shrink.