Life's Too Short (The Friend Zone #3)(81)

I couldn’t save Vanessa. I couldn’t even convince her to reconsider her options. Grace would be gone in a few months. I’d managed to fuck up my job. I’d lost control. All of it. The tornado was flinging bits and pieces of my life in every direction and the mess was getting larger by the minute, too big to clean up.

A frantic, primal self-preservation instinct clawed around inside of me. An urge to fix it, make it right. Stabilize something.

But there was only one thing I could fix. I could backpedal the damage I’d done here. At least this I could put back in order. This was in my control.

“What do you need, boss?” Becky asked like she could sense my shift in resolve.

“I need you to make a discovery request from the Minneapolis PD. I want the bodycam footage for the Bueller case.”

I sat up and clicked open my briefcase. “I need you to call everyone in here. Order takeout for dinner and get me the Keller, Bueller, and Garcia files. We’re pulling an all-nighter.”





CHAPTER 28





TAKE THIS QUIZ TO SEE IF HE’S GHOSTING YOU!




VANESSA Adrian didn’t come home last night. Or the night before that or the night before that. I mean, he did—sort of. He crawled into bed at 2:00 a.m. Then he’d get up and leave again at 6:00. He’d reply to my texts with one word.

Sometimes he didn’t reply at all.

I’d shown up with lunch yesterday to surprise him and found him in the conference room with a dozen other people, already eating sandwiches. He’d smiled up at me almost professionally. Like I was a client.

He kissed me swiftly, promised to eat what I brought for dinner, and apologized for needing to go back to work. Then he led me out with a hand on my lower back, and I found myself in the lobby outside the elevators wondering what had just happened.

I kept telling myself it was temporary. He was slammed with a big case—he’d gotten behind the last few weeks.

But another part of me knew it wasn’t.

I felt like he was trying to distance himself from me. It was like I was watching his life after I’d died. Like he was working himself to the bone to fill the void, mourning me, and I wasn’t even gone yet.

I understood why he was struggling with my decision. He was pragmatic, a man of action. When presented with a problem, he researched it, looked at all the angles, and then argued his way out of it—and he wasn’t used to losing.

He wanted to exhaust every avenue. Take me to every specialist, read about every case study, and enroll me in every clinical trial. But none of it would save me. None of it. The sooner he understood that, the sooner we could get back to living our lives—because right now we weren’t.

I missed him. I missed him so much.

Something had fractured between us, and I didn’t know how to fix it because I couldn’t give him what he wanted. So I just spent the days wandering around his apartment like a ghost, hoping he’d come back to me.

Brent had thrown himself headfirst into BoobStick production, so he was busy. Dad got the job he interviewed for and was gone during the days now, which meant I couldn’t take Grace over there for lunch. Dinner was out of the question because I wanted to be here if Adrian came home at a decent hour. So I was alone. All the time.

Just me and Grace.

I was lying on the bed with her yesterday, her little hand wrapped around my finger. I wondered if she would remember me when I was gone, some tiny, internalized recollection of a brown-eyed woman who loved her once. I felt myself willing her to look at my face and keep it somewhere safe inside her. Then I realized that she’d have to put it the same place she’d put Adrian—because she’d be losing him too.

I’d always thought of Adrian as a sentinel. A lighthouse in a storm. Safe and grounding and orienting. Constant. But he was crumbling under the weight of this. And I had the sad realization that if Grace was ours and he lost me like Dad lost Mom, Adrian would have disappeared on Grace too, back into his work, to cope with my loss.

Dad, even with all his faults, had kept us all together after Mom’s death. We’d lost her, but we never lost each other.

It was funny to think that Dad was stronger in this way than Adrian. Dad.

Dad’s coping mechanism hadn’t been much healthier. But at least he was there.

I needed something to do, so I completed my end-of-life checklist. Today I went to the funeral home and made my arrangements.

I didn’t want an urn. I didn’t want to be part of the hoarded clutter in Dad’s house if he went back to it, but I fully rejected spending $7,000 on a casket and a burial plot when that money could go to ALS research.

So I bought a cremation and opted for the cardboard box for my remains. I didn’t trust that Dad would spread them someplace meaningful, even if I spelled out exactly where I wanted to be laid to rest. I’d probably end up in the pantry next to the cans of expired corned beef hash and fruit cocktail. My guess was that Adrian would be too upset to carry this out. So I entrusted this final task to Drake and told him to sprinkle my ashes in the ocean.

Instead of an end-of-life celebration, I put money down with my travel agent to book Dad, Annabel, Brent, Joel, and Grace on a round-the-world cruise. They could celebrate my life while celebrating the beauty that living has to offer.

And then I was done.

I’d planned it all. Set everything up. The only thing left was to make sure I had a plan for Grace.