Page 29 of Slow Hands Cowboy

AI.

That poor girl.

This is so sad

My life would be absolutely over if my husband did this to me.

“Well, good thing he didn’t, bitch, or you would be dead,” Addison muttered furiously, scrolling through the comments.

Addison would not be dead.

She had decided that.

It was the strangest thing, because last night when she had told Walker that she was two out of the three things she listed, she had meant it. She hadn’t even thought about it.

But she wasn’t heartbroken.

Because she was just angry.

She didn’t feel devastated; she felt… She didn’t even know what. Like it wasn’t fair that he was the one that had done it. Because if she was honest, if she was really honest, she had been looking for signs that the wedding wasn’t supposed to go forward.

She dropped her phone on the bed and covered her face with her hands.

She hadn’t really wanted to get married.

Or at least, she had hefty doubts, but this felt a lot like being fired when you had been on the verge of quitting.

But you weren’t on the verge of quitting. You were going to follow through with it, because you knew that it was important to everybody else. You had gone too far, and you weren’t going to let anybody down.

That was a terrible reason to get married. A horrible reason to go through with a wedding.

But she just felt… Well, right now she felt numb. And maybe she didn’t really feel that way. Maybe she hadn’t actually had doubts, but she was never going to be able to see Alan the same way again because she had just watched a video of him running away from her, a hundred times, from just as many different angles.

How could she ever be sure how she felt? What she might’ve done, what she was actually feeling underneath everything?

She didn’t think she could be sure.

Maybe she was just trying to soothe herself now, with the false idea that part of her had seen it coming or known better or something, because the alternative was to be blindsided.

She decided she had to stop watching the video.

She opened up her other primary form of social media and saw that her private message inbox was bursting full of missives she had no desire to read.

She had media outlets asking her questions, people sending her love.

Oh no.

Her stomach twisted with dread, and she quit scrolling through the box.

He had told her not to doom-scroll. He had told her to take a break. She really needed to do that.

But before that, she decided to call her dad.

“Have you heard from Alan?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t. He’s about the only person I haven’t heard from. I have about five hundred messages from everybody else.”

“Well, you disappeared.”