Page 33 of Don't Go
“It’s going to be okay,” I told myself and let out a breath.
The lie was still the same.
6.Sabrina
It had been a week.
Which wasfine. Which was, in fact,ideal.
Mr. Cross had taken my daughter's number off her like a man who was used to getting what he wanted, typed those digits into his fancy phone, saved the contact under whatever he had decided to save it under, and then did absolutely nothing.
No call, no text, not one of those passive-aggressive thinking-of-you messages a woman could screenshot for her group chat and roll her eyes at over a glass of wine. A week of nothing.
Which wasperfect, to be clear.
I wouldn't have answered. I would’ve let his name sit on my screen until the call went to voicemail, and I would’ve ignored the voicemail for, on principle, three to five business days. He would’ve had to work for any response. He would’ve had to send a follow-up, which I would’ve also ignored, and we would’ve proceeded in this manner until he eventually gave up and I won.
That had been the plan. The plan required him to call me first.
But he hadn't called me first.
And so, instead of executing my masterful campaign of romantic disinterest, I'd spent a week in a low-grade civil warwith my own brain on the subject of why a man would take a woman's number off her eight-year-old, almost kiss her at her kitchen counter, walk out of her apartment in his crooked expensive suit, and then choose silence.
There were theories. He had hated me. He had lost the phone. He had reconnected with an ex. He had died. All of these were preferable to the leading theory, which was that he had simply not thought about it again.
Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina, no.
I shook the thought off. I was three blocks from home with a daughter to feed, a refill to pick up, and a cat who was, as we spoke, almost certainly knocking something off a shelf out of pure ideology. I had alife. I couldn't afforddistractions.
I pushed through the door of the pharmacy on Vandenberg.
The shop was warm and bright, smelling of cough drops and floor cleaner. The muzak was a tinny corporate version of a song I'd liked when I was nineteen and couldn't now identify. Two people were ahead of me in line — a man arguing with the pharmacist about a coupon that was either expired or never valid in the first place, and a woman in a green coat scrolling on her phone.
I joined the line and pulled out my own phone for the same reason as every other adult in a pharmacy line, which was to have somewhere to put my eyes that wasn't the man arguing about the coupon.
A reminder I'd set on my phone was on the lock screen.Bonnie. Dr. Reyes. 22 days.I stared at the number, closed the notification, and started thumbing through nothing in particular. Mrs. Park had texted me earlier —all good, kid eating, cat yelling at her. I tapped a heart on it without looking too closely, because Mrs. Park's check-ins were the closest thing to a hand on my shoulder I'd had in months, and I didn't currently have the bandwidth to be touched by anything.
The man with the coupon left, swearing under his breath. The woman in the green coat moved forward.
Someone ahead of me, half-turned toward the door, asked, "Sabrina?"
I knew the voice.
I knew it before I looked up, and I had a sequence of thoughts in the space of half a breath that ran approximately as follows:No, no, no, not him! Not here. Of all the pharmacies in the city. Of all the days. Of all the times. This isn't happening. This isn't — okay, this is happening.
I looked up.
He was at the counter, half-turned toward me, holding a small white paper bag with the chain's logo. It was the same logo on the bag the pharmacist was already preparing to hand me.
He was wearing a hoodie — gray cotton, full zipper, and jeans, and, worst of all, sneakers with laces. I'd seen Beau Cross at a black-tie auction. I'd seen him in an expensive suit. I hadn't, at any point, mentally accounted for the existence of a hoodie in his wardrobe, and now there was one, and it was — to my outrage —he looked great.
He looked relaxed. He looked like he had been borrowed out of someone else's life and was returning it later that afternoon.
His eyes were — stop it. Sabrina, stop it.
The pharmacist behind the counter said my name. I turned to her. She had Bonnie's bag in her hand. I took it, and I didn't put it in my purse fast enough — there was a pause, half a beat, where it sat in the air between us — and Beau was looking at it.
He had, of course, seen the row of orange bottles on my kitchen counter. He had been hungover six feet from them. He wasn't going to pretend he hadn't seen them, and I wasn't going to volunteer them to him here at a chain pharmacy.
