Chapter 1: Fucking New York City

He’d kept in touch – letters, postcards, the occasional videotape wrapped in bubble envelopes like precious cargo – and so it wasn’t hard to find him. He’d written her at least once a week since he’d left. All those months ago and now it feels like years and she feels like an old, old, empty husk of a woman. She’d ridden to Whistler in Peggy’s limo with Helena and Carmen and Al and she’s so far away from all of that, now. That whole life: rich friends, rich world, rich life. Weddings and bachelor parties and feeling herself slipping away, inch by inch. She’d given everything, risked everything and she was walking away.

Even she couldn’t completely understand her actions, her choices, but … fuck, what else could she do? What other choice could she have made, backed into a corner the way she had been? All of her friends – her family – had been counting on her, hoping for her and she knew that. Facing all of them, facing Carmen, and trying to say those words… there was just no way she ever could have.

Her trusty black Chucks were covered with flecks of dried and crusty sidewalk salt, but she didn’t bother to scratch it off as she sat slumped in the backseat of the Yellow Cab. Once she’d given Al the message to give to Carmen, she went back up to her room, changed out of her dress shoes and into her Chucks, stuffed her clothes back into her duffle bag and left.

She just stared at the salt on the side of her sneaker, hand propping up her chin, her eyes threatening to droop closed even as she was sitting there. It had been a long flight – she’d only just caught the last one out of the Whistler airport – and her body was aching from stress and lack of sleep, but she didn’t have to go much further. It was late and she knew that and it would be even later when she got to where she was going, but it was the only place she could think of to go.