All Chapters of Break up with me: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Roman found her at the range on a Wednesday morning, which should have been impossible, because Dani had never told him where the range was, not the actual location, and when she saw his car parked at the edge of the gravel lot at six-fifty in the morning, she stopped walking with her bow case over her shoulder and stared at it for a long moment before she went in.The Range 9 Archery Club sat on a thirty-acre strip of county land south of Bramwell, carved out of a pine plantation that had gone feral, the trees grown up thick and dark and close, the lanes cut into them like corridors. The club had been there since 1974, run by volunteers, funded by dues that barely covered the mowing, and the range itself was a row of shooting lanes marked by numbered bales and wooden posts, a covered shooting line with a corrugated tin roof, and a clubhouse that was really just a shed with a coffee maker and a bulletin board full of tournament flyers nobody had cleaned off since the C

The restaurant had been Roman's pick, a small place on a side street in Ashford with ten tables and a chef who knew him by name and seated them by the window without asking. Dani had worn a dress she'd borrowed from Jess, because she didn't own a dress that felt right for a place with cloth napkins, and she'd spent the whole dinner trying not to feel like the small-town girl in the big-city restaurant, and failing, and then Roman had made her laugh about something she couldn't remember now, and the failing had stopped mattering.The restaurant was called Marcellino's, and it sat on a side street in the old part of Ashford, a narrow room with exposed brick and ten tables and no sign out front, the kind of place you only found if someone who'd been there brought you, and the chef, a man named Aldo who'd cooked in Milan before he'd come to Ashford and opened a ten-table room because he hated large kitchens, had come out of the back personally to shake Roman's hand and sea

The first bouquet arrived on Wednesday. Not roses, not anything that screamed money. Wildflowers, the kind that grew along the roadside outside Bramwell, Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans and something purple she couldn't name, wrapped in brown paper like it came from a roadside stand, not a florist. A card tucked into the paper said, in handwriting she now recognized: *i'm sorry. take it back?*She put the flowers in a coffee mug on the workbench and she didn't reply.The mug was one Sal had given her years ago, white ceramic, chipped at the rim, with the words "GAS, GRASS, OR ASS" printed on the side in faded red letters, a joke from a generation that thought that was funny. Dani had kept it because Sal had given it to her, and she used it for everything, coffee, pens, loose bolts, and now wildflowers from a boy she'd thrown out of the shop. The flowers looked absurd in it, the purple spilling over the chipped rim, and she left them there anyway, becau

The rain started at eleven on Friday night and by midnight the road outside the warehouses was slick and black and empty, and Roman sat in the Skyline with the engine off and the wipers going slow and he waited.He'd gotten there early, an hour before they'd agreed, because he'd needed the time alone to think about what he was going to tell her, and he'd sat in the car watching the rain build from a drizzle to a downpour, the warehouses around him dark and dripping, the sodium lights turning the wet asphalt the color of an old bruise. He'd rehearsed the words twice in his head and abandoned both versions, because there was no clean way to say what he needed to say, no version of it that didn't sound like an excuse or a confession or both.Dani pulled up at twelve-oh-three in the Nissan, the car washed and clean and the new coilovers visibly lower in the stance, and she got out into the rain and she walked to his window and she leaned down and she said, "We can

He took her to the hills the next Saturday, the Skyline parked at the bottom of a fire road that wound up through the pines to a ridge overlooking the whole valley, and at the top of the ridge, in the gold light of late afternoon, he stopped the dirt bike and he killed the engine and the silence that followed was the kind of silence you could feel in your chest.The fire road climbed through a stand of old-growth pine that the logging company had never gotten to because the grade was too steep for the trucks, and the trees had grown up tall and close, their canopy filtering the light into columns, and the road surface was soft with needles, and the dirt bike had left a clean single track up through it, the only mark on the mountain. At the top the trees broke and the ridge opened out onto a flat outcrop of granite, and the whole valley lay below them, the river a silver ribbon, the town of Bramwell a handful of rooftops in the distance, and the track at Pinetop a pale