Chapter 5: Packing a Bag

"Who is this?"

I typed it out, then deleted it, then typed it again. The cursor blinked at me, patient and indifferent. Whoever it was knew things they shouldn't. Tonight wasn't the first time. That sentence had lodged itself behind my ribs and wouldn't stop pulsing.

I sent the message. No reply came.

I couldn't be here anymore. That much I knew, even if I understood almost nothing else about the wreckage of my night.

I climbed the stairs again, slower, my bare feet silent. The bedroom door was still open. I walked past it without looking inside.

The closet, at least, I could face. I pulled my suitcase down from the top shelf … the one we'd used for our honeymoon … and set it open on the bench where Ash had packed his own bag less than an hour before.

I didn't think about what I was folding. My hands moved on their own … a sweater, jeans, the gray cardigan I kept for cold mornings, tossed in without any care. I wasn't packing for a trip. I was packing for an escape, and escapes don't leave room for careful folding.

I paused at my jewelry box, my hand hovering over the drawer where I kept my wedding ring on nights I took it off to do dishes or garden. I hadn't taken it off tonight. It was still on my finger, through the entire conversation with Ash, and I hadn't even noticed until now.

I twisted it slowly. It came off easier than I expected, a faint groove worn into my skin beneath it.

I didn't put it in the drawer. I set it on the dresser in plain sight, where he'd see it the next time he came home for whatever he'd left behind. I wanted him to understand, without a word from me, exactly what tonight had cost.

My phone buzzed again as I zipped the suitcase closed.

I nearly dropped it, some frantic hope rising that it might finally be an answer. It wasn't the unknown number. It was my sister.

*You up? Saw you called earlier and missed it, everything ok?*

I hadn't called her. Not that I remembered, though the last two hours had gone strange and slippery in my head. Maybe I had, in some blank moment I couldn't account for.

I typed back: *Not really. I need to get out of here tonight.*

Her reply came fast. *Go to Mom and Dad's. You still have your key. I'll come by first thing in the morning, I promise.*

*I don't want to be there alone,* I typed.

*You won't be for long. Just get there safely tonight. Call me the second you're inside.*

I stared at the screen a moment, wishing she could just meet me there now, tonight, and knowing she couldn't … her kids, the drive, the hour. It would have to be enough that she was awake and thinking of me from thirty miles away.

I carried the suitcase downstairs, needing the weight of it in my hand as proof that I was actually doing this, and not simply having the kind of nightmare I'd wake from tangled in our sheets with Ash's arm still slung over my waist.

I stood in the foyer for a moment, looking back at the space that had been my entire adult life … the console table, the honeymoon photo still hanging crooked on the wall because neither of us had bothered to fix it. It didn't feel solid anymore. It felt like a stage set, thin and hollow behind its polished surfaces, and I wondered how long it had actually been that way before I was allowed to see it.

I left without looking back a second time.

Marcus glanced up as I crossed the lobby, suitcase rolling behind me, and something in his face told me he'd already guessed enough not to ask questions. He just nodded and held the door.

The night air hit me, cool and sharp, and for a moment I just stood breathing it in. My car was parked half a block down. I hadn't planned to drive tonight, hadn't planned any of this, but my legs carried me toward it anyway.

I sat behind the wheel a full minute before turning the key, feeling suddenly, impossibly tired. Then I started the engine and pulled out, heading toward the house I'd grown up in … the one place that had never once asked me to pretend I was fine.

The drive took forty minutes. I don't remember most of it. My mind looped through the same handful of images, refusing to settle on any, long enough to process it. I only came back to myself fully when I turned onto my parents' old street, the houses dark and sleeping, a porch light here and there.

My childhood home sat at the end of the block, its windows dark except for the porch light my mother always left burning … an old habit from a lifetime ago, when she used to wait up for my father.

I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine.

I got out of the car and left the suitcase in the trunk, needing a moment first to stand on solid, familiar ground.

That's when I noticed the front door was already open.

Not wide. Just a few inches, dark space showing through the gap. And I stood frozen in the driveway with my keys still in my hand, certain … absolutely certain … that I had left that door locked the last time I'd been here.