I still hadn’t cried, I realized as I looked at Shane. Maybe it was because I was holding on to a hope that Aerin hadn’t meant what she’d said.

“Look, I’m tired, Shane. Tired. Confused. And just wanting this night … no this day to be over so that I can hit the reset button on everything!”

I paused, and then gave her a small smile, “Thanks for offering to take me home.”

She opened her mouth, as if she was about to add something, but she closed it and nodded. She turned and continued to hold on to my elbow.

She drove us out of the WeHo neighborhood, heading south, without another word. She reached out and squeezed my hand from time to time, as if trying to reassure me.

After a few minutes, I realized that she was driving towards Century City. I turned to ask her after we stopped at a light, “Are you taking surface roads all the way to Venice, Shane?”

She smiled and shook her head. At the next light, she made a left to enter the garage of a mall.

As she turned a corner in the ground floor of the mostly deserted parking lot, I recognized Aerin’s rental that was parked halfway down the row of empty parking slots. And I saw my beloved leaning against the driver’s side door, hands clasped behind her, standing underneath a lamp, her face deathly worried.

My mouth spread into a wide grin, and I turned to Shane, “I could kiss you right now Shane if I didn’t want to smack you first!”

“Why?!” she exclaimed. She was smiling broadly also.

“For letting me suffer through all of that in the first place!” I answered.

She pulled up next to Aerin’s rental with flourish.

Aerin yanked my door open, and she looked at me, anxiety written all over her face.  Her eyes were filled with a mix of contriteness and heart-wrenching sorrow. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She was ashen-faced and she bit down on her lip hard.

I unbuckled and hopped out of Shane’s jeep, collapsing into Aerin’s warm embrace.

Incongruously, that’s when I began to cry. I sobbed like a baby in her arms while she somehow held me up. My body was wracked with sobs and my shoulders shook uncontrollably as I moaned aloud, like my heart was splitting in two.