Chapter 2

So she screamed off into the night, memories burning her. She had to get away, the lies and the reality of her situation screaming in her head. The cacophony was deafening and all it did was make her drive faster. Siana pushed her emotions down and away, she couldn’t deal with them right now, didn’t have the space to manage her emotions and the screaming cacophony of memory. All she could do was drive into the night.

She jumped onto the freeway, a momentary hesitation about which direction she was supposed to be going until she figured out that for the first time in her life she wasn’t supposed to go in a specific direction. She was just fleeing now, getting as far away as fast as she could and there was something akin to freedom in that. But the freedom was sad and flaccid. She wished she could go back, but that house of lies was burning in her rearview mirror. She had enough self-respect not to go back to that. Right?

She drove for three days, only stopping except at rest stops to use the bathroom and to wash her face clean of the tears that wouldn’t stop falling no matter how fiercely she tried to push the emotions away. On the fourth day she stopped briefly to eat at a tiny roadside diner and take a nap in the practically abandoned parking lot of a defunct department store. That only lasted until she was woken up by a cop ordering her to move on.

So, she did, driving aimlessly for another two days until she could smell the sea. That’s when she realized that she had absolutely no idea where she was. Not in her life and not on the road. She’d always had a roadmap of things that she needed to do but that roadmap was defunct now. She turned her phone back on, it’d been off since that night. Siana watched the messages roll in. They were mostly from wedding guests asking what had happened even though she’d asked for privacy and quiet. The rest of them were from her mother begging her to reconsider, telling her that she’d never find anyone better and, in that moment, she nearly turned around and went back.

But the messages also threw something else into sharp relief. The fact that besides her mother and one of the friends she’d managed to retain, all the wedding guests were his friends, his family. She’d had no input in the wedding except picking out her gown and the cake tasting. She’d bowed to his opinions on everything even down to the DJ for the ceremony instead of the quiet, elegant string quartet she’d wanted. Where had she gone? Why had she let herself disappear behind his wants?

She sent her mother a message that she was safe, even though the woman hadn’t asked. She never had cared much about Siana’s safety so that was normal even if it did hurt. She sent messages to some of the ones that had actually expressed sympathy, letting them know that she was safe but nothing else and turned her phone back off, ignoring the hundred missed calls that she knew were from him as well as the gloating texts from the unknown number that she had to imagine was Brit exalting in the fact that she’d fled, and the other woman had won.

Siana didn’t care that the other woman had won, her heart was still trying to break under the knowledge that she’d never been loved, that everything was a lie and the only thing keeping it together was string and tape made of stubbornness and anger. She’d fall apart later; she couldn’t afford to fall apart now. But emotions kept trying to creep in where she’d shut them out, anger and sorrow and pain and loss. She just kept shoving them back into her head.

By the time she’d been driving for five days she became aware that not only had she driven away from everything she owned without so much as a change of clothes, but she hadn’t showered in enough days that her hair was crunchy, and she definitely smelled stellar if the reaction of that woman at the last rest stop was any indication. She had to find a place to shower and maybe take a nap.