He laid it gently across the passenger seat.
One flower felt personal in a way a dozen wouldn’t have. I hated how quickly my mind filled in the blanks anyway.
The next stop only made it worse. A small tailor shop sat two blocks further down. Elliot went in empty-handed and came out carrying a navy garment bag, which he hung carefully across the back seat.
Flowers. Freshly pressed clothes. Another late night already promised for that evening. The message.
I gripped the steering wheel until my fingers actually ached.
“Stop doing this,” I whispered to myself. “You don’t know anything yet.”
But doubt is persuasive. Once it gets into your head, it starts quietly rewriting yesterday. Every late meeting suddenly looks suspicious. Every distracted smile takes on a different meaning.
Once it gets into your head, it starts rewriting yesterday.
I found myself remembering little things I’d never once questioned before. A Saturday he’d left early. A text that had made him smile at his phone a beat too long. A Friday he’d come home humming a song I didn’t recognize.
None of it had bothered me at the time.
Now it all lined up, uninvited, into a picture I very much did not want to see.
Elliot drove another fifteen minutes before turning into the parking lot of the Ashgrove Community Center. I blinked.
This wasn’t a hotel. Not a restaurant. Not even an office building.
A banner near the entrance read: THURSDAY BALLROOM SOCIAL.
Ballroom?
This wasn’t a hotel.
I almost smiled despite everything. Elliot couldn’t dance. At our own wedding reception, he’d stepped on my shoes so many times my maid of honor had joked about adding steel-toed boots to our first anniversary gift.
