Better Off Alone

Chapter 4

(Rebecca's POV)

The rain starts before I make it two blocks from the house.

Not a gentle rain. Not one of those soft Tennessee drizzles that kiss your face and make the grass smell sweet.

This is a punishment rain, the kind that comes sideways and hits your skin like little needles. And of course it just has to rain now when I don't have an umbrella.

I wrap my arms around myself. My blouse is already sticking to my shoulders. My hair is flat against my neck, dripping. I should take shelter in that coffee shop. It's right across the street, and will save me from getting more drenched. Or Connie's place, a hotel, anywhere with a roof and no birthday paintings on the wall.

But my legs won't move. My legs are heavy as stone. The rest of me might still be pretending, but my legs know the truth, and the truth is that I've been running around for six years building a home that never had space for me. And now that I left, I have no idea where to go.

So I stand here. In the rain. Like an i***t.

A car pulls up to the curb.

I don't look. Probably an Uber dropping someone off. Or a stranger who'll glance at the wet woman on the sidewalk and keep driving, because that's what people do. They keep driving.

But the car stops. The engine cuts. The door opens and footsteps come toward me, quick and sure on the wet pavement.

"Rebecca?"

The rain stops hitting my head.

Not actually stops—I can still hear it hammering the pavement all around me—but something blocks it from above, and a shadow falls over me.

I look up.

An umbrella. Black, wide, tilted toward me. And beneath the umbrella, a face I haven't seen in six years but recognize like my own heartbeat.

“Eric.”

He looks exactly the same and completely different. Same sharp jaw, same serious eyes behind those wire-frame glasses he's worn since college that could see through everything. But he's broader now, filled out, more mature. And there's a confidence in the way he stands that wasn't there when we were nineteen and pulling all-nighters in Professor Luke’s lab, arguing over circuit boards and eating cold ramen out of the pot.

"It is you.” He steps closer, tilting the umbrella so it covers me fully. His left shoulder is getting soaked. He doesn't seem to notice or care. “I thought—I was driving past and I saw someone standing in the rain like a maniac, and I thought, no way, but then—" He stops. Looks at me properly. The half-smile drops off his face. "What are you doing standing in the rain?"

I open my mouth to say something. Oh, just out for a walk. Funny running into you. Small world.

What comes out is: "I don't know."

Eric looks at me for a long moment. Not the way Sean looks at me — through me, past me, around me. Eric looks at me. I don't know when was the last time anyone looked right at me. Like I'm the only thing in the frame.

"Come on," he says. "You're freezing."

He puts his hand on my back — light, careful, like I'm something that might break — and steers me towards the coffee shop.

Inside, it's bright and warm. The kind of warm that hits you all at once when you've been cold for too long. My skin prickles. I sit down at a corner table, and take in the smell of roasted beans and cinnamon. Eric goes to the counter and comes back two minutes later with two cups. He slides one across to me.

Black, with a shot of hazelnut.

I stare at it. "You remember how I take my coffee."

"Of course."

I wrap both hands around the cup. The heat stings my cold fingers. It feels so good I could cry. I might actually be crying. It's hard to tell with the rainwater still running down my face.

Eric sits across from me, folds his umbrella, leans it against the chair, and waits. He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't push. He just sits there, drinking his coffee, letting the silence hold.

That's the thing about Eric. He was always good at silence. Most people fill it — with advice, with questions, with the sound of their own voice. Eric lets it breathe. He trusts you to talk when you're ready.

I take a sip. The coffee burns the roof of my mouth.

"It's been what, six years?" I ask.

"Six years, two months, eleven days." Eric says it lightly, like a joke, but his eyes are serious.

"You look the same."

"You look cold."

I laugh. It comes out rough, like something scraped out of the bottom of a drawer. But it's real. Eric smiles — small, just the corner of his mouth — and something inside me unlocks a little.

"How are you? What are you doing now? Last I heard you were—"

"Running RobotX." He pauses. "Based on your design, by the way. The NanoStep platform. I credited you in the patent filing."

"I know. I saw the article in Tech Review." I didn't tell Sean. He wouldn't have cared. Or he would've asked why I was reading robotics journals instead of organizing his files.

"We went public last year."

"You what?"

"Went public. IPO. The whole thing." He takes a sip of his own coffee. "You'd know that if you'd answered any of my emails."

I wince. He's right. He sent me emails, messages, even a handwritten letter once, and I ignored all of them because Sean didn't like me keeping in touch with men from before.

And I was so bent on proving I was a good wife that I cut off every part of my life that didn't revolve around him. Including Eric. Including the lab.

Including myself.