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“Rhett was a momentary blip on my radar,” I say. “A second of weakness. I barely knew him! It’d be ridiculous to be still hung up on him.”
“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be this upset.”
“I’m not upset!” I pause, take a deep calming breath and say evenly, “Am I still a little annoyed that he called me a superficial worker drone who hates love and anything that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it? Yes. But Rhett wasn’t living in the real world. He was stupid enough to think that the Alencars could have a happy ending. He thought there was some world in which we—”
My words cut off in a horrible crack of emotion. I wipe angrily at my eyes, and say, sullenly, “There are no happy endings. Rhett and I never would have worked.”
“I don’t want to say it—” Anna starts.
I know instantly and fury rips through me. “We all can’t be as happy as you and Cole, okay?!” I all but scream at her.
“Jeez, Liz!” Anna says. “Don’t talk to me like that!”
I put my hands over my eyes, willing myself to calm down.
“And that wasn’t what I was going to say. But do you think Cole and I are happy all the time? Or honestly have a ton in common?” Anna asks. “You remember how much I hated him when we first met. I was a dreamer. He was a cold-hearted realist. Not a lot has changed.”
“Well good for you two, but I don’t see how—”
“You keep going on about how different you two are, but I can tell you firsthand that the differences are what keeps things interesting. I’ve grown as a person, Cole has too. You and Rhett challenged each other, but that’s far from a bad thing.”
“It’s more than that,” I say. “I’m the bad guy. I’m the asshole.”
“Liz. I would not be here if you were some stone-cold businesswoman with a gold coin where her heart should be. Come on. Despite your best efforts, this is not you at all. I mean, look at you. You’ve lost weight. You look like shit.”
“Always love a compliment,” I mutter.
“The point is that you’re miserable. Try as you might, you’re not anything like that jackass boss of yours. You need to figure out a way to fix this before you jump off a roof.”
I look into my vodka soda and then set it on the coffee table without finishing it. She’s not wrong, of course. I’ve taken on way too much these past months. I’m irritable, angry. I don’t enjoy anything and every moment I allow myself to think, I wish I were somewhere else. Specifically in a roadside motel with a gorgeous guy who made me laugh until I cried, before it all went so terribly wrong.
But I ruined that. I had my shot and I blew it to pieces.
“There’s nothing I can do,” I say, my head down.
“Find Rhett. Talk to him. Make up and get back together, or don’t but say everything you need to say in order to move on.”
I shake my head. “It’s not so easy,” I say. “I’ve tried to look for him, but he’s off the grid.”
“Sloane?” Anna asks.
“She was furious when I quit. She’ll tell me to fuck off and not much more.”
Anna bites her lip. “That complicates things.”
“Don’t I know it,” I mutter.
“Well then you have to wait for him to turn back up. And in the meantime, maybe you should figure out what kind of person you want to be when he eventually comes back.”
I pick up my drink, drain the rest of it. “Or maybe this is just who I am now. Maybe deep down it’s who I’ve always been, who I’ve always wanted to be.”
“I don’t believe that,” Anna whispers.
I don’t want to either.
CHAPTER TWENTY
RHETT
