Delaney James was wearing Chanel the night her husband told her he didn't love her anymore.
In an instant, her picture-perfect Manhattan life-complete with a brownstone on the Upper East Side, a blossoming career as a fashion journalist, and a devas...
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Sunlight punches through the blinds and lands directly behind my eyes.
I groan and bury my face deeper into the pillow, but the damage is already done. My head feels like it's been split open from the inside out, every pulse of my heartbeat driving another spike through my skull. My mouth is dry enough that my tongue sticks to the roof of it, and when I force myself upright, the room immediately tilts hard to the left.
I squeeze my eyes shut and sit perfectly still until the dizziness passes.
Jesus Christ.
The last thing I remember clearly is sitting in my living room with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Everything after that exists in disconnected flashes.
A raised voice.
Broken glass.
Someone crying.
The thought sends a knot of dread into my stomach.
Slowly, I open my eyes and look around the room. That's when I notice the other side of the bed.
The comforter is twisted back and the pillow beside mine is indented as though someone slept there.
Delaney.
The sight hits me harder than the hangover.
I stare at the pillow for several seconds, trying to separate memory from imagination. There's a vague recollection of her fingers moving through my hair and the feeling of someone holding me, but the details are slippery enough that I can't trust them.
Why would Delaney stay?
The question immediately becomes another one.
What the fuck did I do?
I don't need to wonder why I grabbed the bottle and went shot for shot with myself. I remember that part perfectly.
The parts of the night that came after the whiskey are mostly a blur, but the afternoon is crystal clear.
I remember walking out of my parents' house feeling like ground had disappeared beneath me. I remember seeing Delaney cross the yard toward me with that smile she always gets when she's excited about something, and I remember knowing almost immediately that I couldn't survive telling her the truth.
So, I did the worst thing I could think of instead – I broke up with her.
The memory makes me sick.
She'd stood there looking confused and hurt while I threw excuse after excuse at her, none of them making any sense because none of them were true. I told myself I was protecting her. I told myself she deserved better than being tied to someone who was about to spend the next several months drowning in grief.
The reality is that I panicked.
Delaney asked if I was okay, and instead of answering the question, I pushed her away before she could see how badly I was falling apart.
