Page 2 of Rejected Hollow

"Thank you." I started stripping the table. "But I'm twenty-two and I've got a car that's held together by prayers and a bank balance that would make you cry. Maybe next year."

The money problem was real. But it seemed to be real always without ever getting better because she'd been hearing maybe next year from me for two years.

My shift ended at six. I sat in my car in the staff parking lot with the engine running for the heater and the windshield slowly un-fogging, and I did the thing I'd promised Marion I'd stop doing. I opened my phone.

It was right at the top of the feed, because of course it was. The algorithm had a sense of humor.

Daniel, on one knee, on a wooden jetty at golden hour. Chloe, hands over her mouth, hair doing that effortless tousled thing I'd watched her spend forty-five minutes on in my bathroom mirror more times than I could count. The ring caught the light. Behind them, the lake shone like a postcard.

She said YES, the caption said, with three heart emojis and a diamond. Here's to forever with my best friend.

His best friend. That was funny. She'd been mine first.

Only six months passed.

That’s how quickly our breakup had become their engagement, and how much of their beginning might have overlapped with my ending. Well, I had never asked Chloe when it had started, exactly. I wasn't sure whether that was cowardice or the last kindness I could still do myself. I just knew it was bad.

Also, I knew that lake. Daniel had taken me there once, in the second summer, when things were still good. Or I'd thought they were. I'd wanted to swim and he'd stayed on the jetty in his jeans with his arms folded and said, "I'm just not really a lake person, Wren." He'd said it the way he said most things near the end: as if I was a slightly slow child who kept asking for the same wrong thing.

It hurt.

Apparently he was a lake person now. Apparently he'd just needed the right person to be a lake person with.

I scrolled down to the comments.

OMG finally!!! Perfect couple ❤️

You two are goals

So happy for you babe, you deserve someone who actually makes an effort x

That one was from Daniel's sister. I read it three times. Someone who actually makes an effort.

I turned the phone face-down on the passenger seat and looked up, and there I was in the rear-view mirror.

It only showed a letterbox of me, but I could see enough. Eyes, glasses, a bit of forehead, the white roots coming through the box dye at my left temple where I hadn't redone it in six weeks. And I did the math. The shadows under my eyes, plus. The round cheeks, plus. The body under the scrubs that I didn't need the mirror to see, because I just knew it by heart he thought it was unattractive.

You're a lot, Wren. In every way. That was what he'd said on the last night, standing in the doorway of our apartment with his bag already packed. I cannot keep doing this.

Chloe was a size eight, which probably wasn't something I should have been thinking about, but I thought about it anyway. I'd lent her my good boots once, and she'd had to wear two pairs of socks just to keep them from slipping off her feet.

I stared at myself in the letterbox mirror until my eyes started to sting. Then I said, out loud to absolutely nobody, "Well. Good for them."

After that, I put the car in gear and drove home through the gray afternoon. I didn't cry. I'd already done all my crying over Daniel by June, and by now the place inside me where the tears used to come from felt completely empty.

Marion's house was the third in a terrace of eleven, halfway up a hill that nobody climbed on purpose except the salt truck, and even that was only in winter. It was red brick with a blue front door and a hanging basket that had been dead since 2019, which Marion refused to take down on principle.

I'd lived there from the age of four until I moved in with Daniel. Then, on the night he left, I'd come back carrying one suitcase and a trash bag. Marion hadn't asked how long I planned to stay, and I hadn't offered an answer.

That was the kind of love Marion did. She loved you by making space for you and refusing to make you explain why you needed it.

I loved that about her.

The sky was the color of dishwater. I let myself in quietly because Marion slept badly, and I didn’t want to wake her. I was halfway through the door before I noticed the envelope and nearly stepped on it.

It was lying in the exact center of the mat, positioned so neatly that it looked as though someone had placed it there by hand rather than sent it through the mail. The envelope was black, a flat, absolute black, like a hole cut into something. The paper was heavy and almost as thick as cardstock. There was no stamp, no postmark, and nothing to suggest how it had gotten there.

On the back, where the flap folded down, someone had pressed a seal into a piece of dull gray metal.