Sin City

I made it back to my own apartment at one in the morning, and I sat on the edge of my bed in my still-damp clothes for a full twenty minutes before I moved.

My studio in Astoria was four hundred and eighty square feet of secondhand furniture, mismatched mugs, and the constant rumble of the N train passing every twelve minutes. It smelled faintly of the lavender candles I burned to cover the smell of whatever the upstairs neighbor was always cooking. The radiator hissed. The window leaked when it rained.

It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life.

It was mine.

I peeled off my wet coat. My ruined silk blouse. The pencil skirt that had a teriyaki stain along the hem now. My bare feet were still streaked with city grime and rain. I should have showered. I should have eaten something. I should have called someone.

Instead, I dragged my old roller suitcase out from under the bed, threw it open on the floor, and started shoving things into it at random.

A sundress. Two pairs of jeans. The good bra. A swimsuit I had not worn in three years. My toothbrush. My passport — why my passport, I had no idea; I was flying domestic — but in I went anyway. The little jewelry box my grandmother had left me. A book I had been meaning to read for six months. A pair of sneakers. The sundress again, because I had already forgotten I had packed it.

Halfway through, I realized I was crying.

Not the pretty kind. The kind where your nose runs and your shoulders shake and the sound that comes out of your throat doesn't sound like a sound you have ever made before.

I sat down on the floor next to the suitcase, pulled my knees up to my chest, and let it happen.

For five minutes. Maybe six.

Then I stood up, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and zipped the suitcase shut.

Crying was a luxury I would allow myself again in approximately forty-eight hours. Right now, I had a flight to catch.

---

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

I knew who it was before I looked.

TRISTAN (1:47 AM): Cass please. Just call me. Let me explain. It wasn't what you think.

TRISTAN (1:48 AM):I love you. You know I love you.

TRISTAN (1:49 AM): I am coming over.

I stared at the screen.

I read those messages three times.

Then I did something I had never, in five years, allowed myself to do.

I blocked his number.

The little gray "Blocked" icon appeared next to his contact, and I felt — God help me — euphoric.

It was the most powerful thing I had ever done.

I scrolled to the next contact. TRISTAN — WORK CELL. Blocked. TRISTAN — EMERGENCY (MOM). Blocked. TRISTAN'S MOTHER (PATRICIA — DO NOT IGNORE). Blocked. Especially blocked.

I deleted his photo from my home screen. The one of us at the Botanic Garden, his arm around my shoulders, both of us squinting into the sun. I had thought it was the happiest I had ever looked.

In the trash it went.

Then, finally, I opened my messages and tapped the only name that mattered.

ME (1:54 AM): Avery.

ME (1:54 AM): Are you awake.

The three little dots appeared immediately.

AVERY (1:54 AM): babe it's 2am of course I am awake what's wrong

I stared at the screen. My fingers hovered.

How do you say it?

How do you tell your best friend, in a single text, that the man you have spent five years of your life loving is currently shirtless in his apartment with a woman wearing the shirt you ironed for him on Sunday?

I typed it three different ways. Deleted all three.

Finally I just sent:

ME (1:56 AM): I caught Tristan with someone tonight.

ME (1:56 AM): In the apartment.

ME (1:56 AM): In our bed.

ME (1:56 AM): His assistant. Brittany.

There was a long pause. Then my phone exploded.

AVERY (1:57 AM): WHAT

AVERY (1:57 AM): WHAT

AVERY (1:57 AM): CASSIDY ELOISE LANE

AVERY (1:57 AM): I am getting in a car right now

AVERY (1:57 AM): where are you

AVERY (1:58 AM): I am going to KILL HIM Cass I am not joking I will end his entire bloodline

I laughed.

A wet, snotty, hiccupping laugh — but a laugh.

ME (1:59 AM): Don't kill him.

ME (1:59 AM): Save the energy.

ME (1:59 AM): I am flying to Vegas in four hours.

The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

AVERY (2:00 AM): I am sorry I think I just had a stroke*

AVERY (2:00 AM): did you say

AVERY (2:00 AM): Vegas

ME (2:00 AM): Yes.

AVERY (2:01 AM): alone??

ME (2:01 AM): Yes.

AVERY (2:01 AM): with what plan

ME (2:01 AM): No plan.

AVERY (2:02 AM): OH MY GOD

AVERY (2:02 AM): YES

AVERY (2:02 AM): YES CASSIDY

AVERY (2:02 AM): DO IT

AVERY (2:02 AM): BURN IT ALL DOWN

AVERY (2:03 AM): I am SO proud of you I might cry

AVERY (2:03 AM): also I'm still going to set his car on fire when you get back ok

AVERY (2:04 AM): just so we're aligned on next steps

I was laughing again, ugly and loud, in my empty apartment at two in the morning.

This. This was why I had survived the last five years.

Avery Kim, with her purple-streaked hair and her potty mouth and her infinite, ferocious, no-questions-asked love.

ME (2:05 AM): I love you. So much.

AVERY (2:05 AM): I love YOU babe

AVERY (2:05 AM): now go to Vegas and do something stupid

AVERY (2:06 AM): something REALLY stupid

AVERY (2:06 AM): the kind of stupid we will be telling our kids about

I smiled at the screen.

If only she had known.

---

I should not have been able to sleep.

I lay on top of my covers fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, and for some reason the only thing I could think about was the day I had met Tristan.

It had been a Tuesday in October, five years ago. I was twenty-one, in my last year at NYU, working a catering shift at a corporate launch event in Midtown to make rent. I had a tray of champagne flutes in one hand and a smile painted on so thick it was starting to hurt my cheeks. He had walked up in a navy suit, taken a glass off my tray, and said, "You look like you wouldd rather be anywhere else."

I had said, "I would rather be in bed with a sandwich."

He had laughed. A real laugh. He had said, "Marry me."

I had thought he was joking.

He had asked for my number before he left. He had called me the next day. He had taken me to a tiny Italian place in the West Village where the waiter knew his name. He had held my coat for me. He had ordered the wine. He had asked me about my dreams — really asked, not the performative way men sometimes do — and when I had told him I wanted to plan weddings, that I wanted my own company someday, that I wanted to make beautiful things for people on the most important days of their lives, he had looked at me across the candle and said, "You are going to be wildly successful, Cassidy Lane. And I'm going to be the man at the next table watching it happen."

I had fallen in love with him over a plate of mushroom risotto.

I had loved him through the move into his apartment that wasn't quite a move-in. Through the engagement ring that never came. Through the three years of "the right moment, baby." Through every late-night work call, every canceled dinner, every excuse, every charming, well-timed apology that had kept me believing — believing, for five years — that the man at the candlelit table was still in there somewhere.

He wasn't.

Maybe he never had been.

Maybe I had spent five years loving the version of Tristan he had performed for me on the night we met — and the man underneath had been Brittany's all along.

I rolled over and looked at the suitcase on my floor.

Something really stupid, Avery had said. The kind of stupid we'll be telling our kids about.

I closed my eyes.

I drifted, finally, into something that wasn't quite sleep but wasn't quite waking either.

---

My alarm went off at four-thirty.

I sat up. I put on jeans and a soft white t-shirt and the only pair of comfortable shoes I owned. I pulled my hair into a messy bun. I didn't put on makeup. I looked, in the mirror, like a girl who had cried for several hours and was about to do something her mother would not approve of.

I looked, for the first time in a long time, like me.

The cab to JFK got me there at five-forty. I checked my single bag. I bought an absurdly expensive bottle of water and a stale croissant from the airport kiosk. I sat at Gate 24 and watched the sky outside the windows turn from black to bruised purple to a thin, hopeful blue.

At six-oh-eight, they called my row.

I stood up. I walked to the gate. I handed the woman my boarding pass.

She smiled at me. "Going for business or pleasure?"

I opened my mouth to say business, the way I always did, the way Tristan had once told me sounded more grown-up, baby.

I closed it.

I smiled back at her — a real smile, my own smile, the one with all my teeth that he had said was too much.

"Pleasure," I said.

I walked down the jet bridge.

The plane was half-empty. I had a window seat. I pressed my forehead to the glass as we taxied, and watched New York City — Tristan's city, the city of the apartment that wasn't mine and the engagement ring that never came and the five years that had vanished like a magic trick — fall away beneath me.

The wheels lifted off the ground.

I exhaled for what felt like the first time in five years.

Wherever I was going, whoever I was about to become, whatever spectacularly bad decisions I was about to make in the next forty-eight hours —

It was going to be mine.

All of it.

Mine.

---

The flight attendant came down the aisle with the drink cart at thirty-five thousand feet. She asked me what I would like.

It was six-thirty in the morning.

"Whiskey," I said. "Neat."

She blinked at me.

I blinked back.

She poured me a tiny bottle of Jameson without another word.

I unscrewed the cap. I lifted the little plastic cup in a silent toast — to Tristan, to Brittany, to the woman I had been at twenty-one with a tray of champagne flutes and a future I had handed to the wrong man.

I knocked it back in one swallow.

It burned all the way down.

I closed my eyes. The plane hummed around me. Somewhere ahead of me, in a desert I had never seen, a city of neon and noise and beautiful, terrible mistakes was waiting.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I didn't care.

For the first time in my entire adult life — I was free.