Chapter 4

Before Ethan could turn that into an argument about my tone, I remembered the other thing I needed from him.

“Your stuff’s packed. When are you picking it up?”

He hung up.

On Saturday afternoon, I was eating a bowl of instant noodles when the smart lock on my front door beeped.

Access denied.

Another attempt. Another failure.

Then it locked out further tries.

I put down my fork and went to the peephole with my phone in my hand. Ethan stood outside. Beside him was Derek, who leaned in to inspect the lock.

“She deleted your fingerprint? What the hell?”

Derek raised his fist to pound on the door. Ethan caught him by the back of his collar and pulled him away. Then he knocked.

I made them wait a few seconds before opening it.

Ethan looked at me without speaking. Derek looked ready to deliver an address on everything wrong with me.

I pointed to the boxes in the living room. “It’s all there. You can check if I missed anything.”

Derek pushed past Ethan.

“So this is the place you blew your savings on?” He looked around my condo. “My balcony’s bigger than this. You should’ve listened to him and bought a car.”

I looked at Ethan. “Did you bring a spokesman?”

Derek swung around. “Excuse me?”

“Enough,” Ethan said. “Remember why you’re here.”

Derek pressed his lips together. Ethan nudged him sharply with his foot.

“I came to apologize,” Derek said at last. “The thing with your client. I was out of line.”

He stared at me.

“There. Happy?”

I stepped aside. “You can start with those boxes.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Then say something.”

I glanced at my noodles. They were going cold.

“What do you want? You say sorry, I say it’s okay, then we hold hands and go back to recess?”

His face flushed.

“Both of you, stop.” Ethan turned to him. “Wait outside.”

Derek gave me one last glare and left.

Ethan waited for the door to close. “What he did was wrong. That’s why I brought him here to apologize. You don’t have to accept it.”

I laughed once. “We both know why he did it. We both know he isn’t sorry. You don’t need to put on a show for me. I don’t need his apology.”

Ethan’s jaw tightened.

“Right. What do you need? You’ve got everything planned. Every penny accounted for.” He looked at the boxes. “Eight years, Clara. Were we really worth less to you than forty-five thousand dollars?”

If we were pricing the relationship, his mother had valued it much more highly.

After graduation, Ethan took me to meet his parents. I’d never been inside a house like theirs. They were polite, asked about my plans, and kept a distance that no amount of smiling from me seemed to close.

His mother spoke to me privately afterward.

“You’re not suited to each other. We won’t support this relationship.”

Then she offered me $150,000 to leave him.

I turned her down without hesitating. Back then, I loved him and believed that was enough. Whatever trouble we had, we’d work it out together.

Now we were fighting over forty-five thousand.

Even my terrible decisions had depreciated.

But it wasn’t only that amount. It was the smaller ones too. The daily spending he barely noticed and I couldn’t stop noticing.

I’d compare delivery coupons to save a couple of dollars. He’d leave the shower running for half an hour. To him, money became worth discussing at a level well above anything I was likely to keep in a checking account.

To me, fifty cents was already money.

I nudged one of the boxes hard enough to slide it across the floor.

“I need to eat,” I said. “I need to pay my mortgage. You left me three hundred dollars. What was I supposed to do?”

“I told you I’d handle it.”

“How?”

The maddening thing was, he could.

His company could be losing money. His own account could be empty. He could owe people more than he had. None of that changed the fact that, if Ethan wanted forty-five thousand dollars, he could get it with a few phone calls.

He’d just proved it.

And he’d made me wait seventeen days.

I pointed at him, too angry to keep my hand still.