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He can’t help but glance over his shoulder at Ash. Catches her as she gives herself an injection in the thigh, right in the middle of a beautiful blooming iris.
It’s in the wild blue moonlight of the witching hour that Ash’s thoughts take over. When her anxious brain catches up to her mouth. When she wakes in bed and panics about-slash-ponders life and death and everything in between. That article she read five years ago about the swarm of murder hornets. And where exactly is her birth certificate? Has Jakob stepped on a rusty nail and gotten lockjaw yet? She replays the conversation she had with her mom before she left for Hawaii. When she suggested that maybe Ash should get a job with health insurance benefits so she doesn’t go broke before she’s fifty. How existing in LA while existing with diabetes is like playing Russian roulette with her money. Rent or insulin? Her parents would never say it, of course, but they worry. They care. She knows that, even though she’s thirty-three years old, her mother still logs on to her CGM app to check the spiking trajectory of her blood sugar.
Maybe her life isn’t as together as she tells herself it is. Maybe it never will be.
Ash shoves the thought from her mind. She has this. Her life gripped with both fisted hands. Even if 75 percent of her brain space is taken up by what-ifs, grudges and so many ways to die before a person’s time.
Ash stares at the ceiling, her mind whirling. Inhales. Exhales.
Everything’s okay. Tessie is fine and she is fine and Augustus is fine. They will all live long and beautiful lives.
She pushed Tessie. Pushed her right into the arms of her flannel-clad mountain man. She helps her clients, but she doesn’t know how to help herself.
Sometimes it’s as if she’s still that little twelve-year-old. Newly diagnosed and unsure about everything. Especially herself. She’s an acquired taste, like fernet or oysters. Never fits in. Too weird. She was never all the fishes in the sea. She was the junky thing found in the bottom of a drawer. And that wasbeforeher diagnosis. After? Friends didn’t get it. They dropped off, quit calling. Either thought she was weird or got weird about it themselves. Ash learned then that when things got hard, people who love her will let go. So it’s better if she does it first.
She believed that for a long time. And then she met Jakob.
Ash met Jakob, a financial controller at a credit union, at a brewery during horror movie trivia night. On paper, they shouldn’t have worked, but they quickly discovered that they liked the same crappy music, shared a hatred of crowds and had insane chemical bliss. He was like cling-film against her skin; she couldn’t pry him off. Eventually, they moved in together. Got engaged. Ash never thought she’d be planning a wedding, but she was. And she did.
Except she never truly saw Jakob.
What he didn’t do.
What he did do.
He always made her feel like that lonely kid left at the lunch table.
Jakob. Even his name means supplanter and deserter. And he lived up to the moniker. He replaced Ash. With a different woman. A better woman.
Even now, years later, the memory lingers. Stings.
Coming home to find him with another woman. The “fucking hell, Ash,” he bleated in surprise. Like it was her fault she walked in on them. The sight of the woman’s bare ass as she ran from the room. The smell of her honeysuckle perfume.
That night, she got drunk and lit her wedding dress on fire in her bathtub.
She gave back the ring. Tessie helped her move out and wore aboys suckmanicure for six months.
She thought she’d be okay. She had survived worse. It was only when Ash found out Jakob had taken the girl on their honeymoon that it was like her world blew up.
After that, she could have starred in a new season ofSnappedall on her own. She quit her job, got a new tattoo and blew through her savings to travel the world. Before then, she was certain she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d let a man and a bad breakup make her go AWOL for six months. She was wrong.
Every emotion—betrayal, rage, grief—she went through it at warp fucking speed.
It wasn’t fair. Cheaters like Jakob get to survive. Love again. Fuck another person over again. While their victims have to wear the battle scars. Even all these years later, Ash has guilt thatshedid something wrong. That she’s a fool because she didn’t see it. That she wasn’tenough.
In the end, it all comes back to that, doesn’t it? That she was too much, too messy.
If not for Tessie, who pulled her back from the pit of a black hole, those thoughts would still eat her alive.
He made you disappear, her cousin said.Come back to us.
So she did.
Tessie and Ash’s mother were relieved. Only now, in hindsight, can she recognize all the times they tentatively broached the subject that Jakob might not be as fucking fabulous as Ash thought. But she never heard them. That’s love.
Obsessive, disgusting denial.
Only her father lived in ignorant man-bliss.He was good to you. He made you laugh, Ash,her father would say, turning a page in his paper, while her mother shot daggers at him from the kitchen. Later, she would pull Ash aside to say,We love him, but your father is an obtuse buffoon.
