I looked up and it was a brand new day. I couldn’t believe that we’d slept all through the night. Then again, what did I expect? That was one heavy session, but then as I stretched out my arm for Adele I noticed that I had been sleeping alone. I looked up and there she was, sitting on the couch facing the window. The cold Adele had returned. I wondered why she’d let me sleep for so long when she looked as if she’d been up for a while. She was sitting with her hair in a bun, which normally meant that she had just stepped out of the shower, in a bathing robe. I watched her for a split second, wondering what she was seeing outside the window, seeing as we were on the twentieth floor. There couldn’t have been much of a view, just people that looked like dots, and the endless skyscrapers around us.“Hey,” I grunted as I tried to sit up, but failed miserably and slumped back into the bed. “I didn’t think that you were ever getting up again. You were dead!” She giggled as I tried to get up

I didn’t understand why she came to help me, I should have said something, told her how grateful I was, but I was so confused about the trail of events. I kept looking out. Expecting that any minute Liam would come back for me. I checked my phone.Nothing.I couldn’t believe that he’d left me like that, but as time went on, I stopped thinking about him and started worrying about myself. About my future. It was clear that Liam didn’t want to be a part of it. Not anymore. Now that he knew the consequences of us being careless. I kept racking my brain, trying to understand. I should have asked how come she wasn’t working at the pharmacy or some kind of conversation, but I was exhausted. I kept expecting Liam to tell the driver to come back. That he’d made a mistake and he didn’t mean it. The reality of being out there for nearly thirty minutes and him not turning back and coming to see that I was okay started to hit home. “I hate him!”She said, “So, you should. God, he’s a jerk. Hey,

I grabbed some tissue and started clearing up the remains of my piss. I flushed the toilet and did everything robotic like about my trip to the bathroom, but, this wasn’t a quick urinating session. I’d done it with a purpose and now that it had gone, I found myself feeling emotional one minute and crying like a baby. Like the one inside of me. And the next, I found myself taking deep breaths, trying to clean up with tissue any piss that had splattered onto the floor. The instructions had said that I needed to run the stick under the pee for a couple of seconds. I hadn’t peed in so long that I hadn’t counted it right. I’d tried counting a second or two and then it’d been three, or maybe it was four? Again the doorbell was going, but this time not just the doorbell. I could hear him yelling outside. The one that’d dumped me like a piece of trash on the curb. He wasn’t going to go away. I needed this time for myself just so that I knew what to do next. I stopped crying, and once again,

Mom could have taken around twenty minutes to come home. It could have been longer. The moment she came through the door and she saw Chanel and I on the sofa, she ran to me. “Adele, what’s wrong? You sounded weird on the phone and then Liam’s acting strange too.”I didn't want to tell her or dramatize the situation, but I’d been repeating how this whole thing was going to go. The moment she walked through the door and into my arms, I lost courage to do it. Literally. I’d been visualizing how the talk was going to go and every single time that I replayed it in my head, it ended up badly. That was when I noticed it, as she cupped my face with her hand. A ring. An engagement ring.I took her fingers from my face, as the rough edges stroked it. “Mom is this what I think it is?”She nodded, but then hesitated as she said, “Yes, Henry proposed last night. He cooked dinner and I had no idea.”“But you haven’t even been going out that long. How could you?”She shook her head. “I thought

I made up my mind, which didn’t mean that things were going to be easy.I rode my bike over to Adele’s place. I thought about what to tell her the whole ride. If the way hadn't been so well lit by street lights, with few cars on the road, I might have crashed because I was so fucking distracted. A small corner of my mind even thought it would be a relief, because it would be some escape out of the situation.But I’m not escaping anymore. I can't keep being a fucking coward. I’m going to face this head on, and I need to get Adele to listen to me.I knew it wouldn’t be easy. She’d been really mad at me, and I couldn’t even blame her.Not too long later, I stood at Adele’s door. I didn’t knock, or ring the bell right away, because I was frozen on her doorstep. I’d arrived, but fuck it, I still didn’t know what I was going to say to her! I turned away from her door and paced down the short driveway, looking up and down the street. I wasn’t leaving, just…taking deep breaths to calm myself