Page 53 of The Escape Plan

The distant flicker of streetlights below don’t cast enough light for me to work—on fuller moon nights, I’ve been jotting down ideas for my article in my notebook—so instead, I wrap my arms around my legs and draw them to my chest, taking a moment to enjoy the dark quiet of the night.

And when I say “moment,” I literally mean it because…

“Evening.”

Beckett’s lilting voice cuts through the night, and for some reason, I’m not surprised in the least when I turn to see him—or rather, see his shadowy outline—standing next to me on the escape, his living room window open behind him.

I nod my head toward it. “If I were you, I’d prop that open. Things seem to have a bad habit of locking themselves around here.”

In the darkness, I see his white teeth flash as he smiles.

“Ah, I don’t know about that,” he says easily as he folds his body to a seated position. He’s wearing a soft sweatshirt that grazes my arm as he sits down right next to me. “I know of worse habits than that.”

“Like?”

“Smoking. Biting your nails. Chewing with your mouth open.” Another flash of teeth. “Drinking so much coffee to get through prolonged jet lag that you end up becoming as nocturnal as your neighbor.”

“That’s a real bad one,” I say solemnly. “How much coffee does one need to achieve that?”

He faces me, leaning the side of his head against the wall. We’re only inches away from each other like this, face to face, and I can make out his features in the darkness. “Honestly? I think it has less to do with the coffee and more to do with what we learned today that’s keeping me awake. How about you? Andrew’s footsteps bothering you again?”

“The man has the tread of an elephant, I swear.”

“Did you guys date for long?”

“A few years. He was my first real relationship.”

“Those can be tough to get over.” Beckett’s eyes move to mine, and his lips pull into a small smile. “But if you want my two cents, he’s an eejit for letting you go.”

His words are sweet, but they don’t quite hit the truth.

“No, I actually don’t think he is,” I say slowly, the creeping realization that’s been niggling at me lately finally coming into words. “I’m beginning to think we never were right for each other.”

Picking at the chipped polish on my nails, I pause. Realize how true these words are.

I hada lot of love for Andrew, at one point, and we got along just fine, for the most part. But I feel like we were stuck in a routine together. I was letting my circumstances dictate what my heart wanted, instead of vice versa, like Gramps once told me to do.

Some hindsight makes me see that clearly now.

In a way, I can understand why Andrew moved on to someone like Lisa. The two of them are friends in a way that me and Andrew never were. She makes him happy like I never did.

I think that, by the end, I was hanging on by a thread—the thought of being left motivating me to try for a relationship that was maybe already in the dust.

“Honestly,” I say, “a part of me wondered if the two of them might make a good match. But maybe I chose to ignore that doubt, and in the end, it came back to bite me. The breakup caught me so off guard that my first reaction was to be more annoyed with myself for not seeing it coming than annoyed at Andrew for actually breaking up with me. Isn’t that messed up?”

Beckett thinks about this for a moment, then shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so. I think it’s possible to feel a lot of complicated things at once, but to focus on one of them as a way of coping with a situation.” He looks down at the ground. “Or focus on none of them at all.”

“That makes sense.” I nod. “I guess I haven’t been able to admit to myself that the sting of sudden rejection may have hurt more than losing the relationship itself. My parents had a really messy divorce when I was a kid, and my dad left my mom for someone else. I was totally blindsided, didn’t see it coming at all. I thought they were happy.”

At the time, it felt like my dad thought my mom wasn’t good enough for him, and I was angry with him for hurting her.

But after that, when my mom in turn left me and Ezra, I was angry with both of my parents—Mom for leaving, Dad for driving her away.

But more than all of that, seven-year-old Keeley was angry withherselfthat she hadn’t been enough to make her own mother stay.

I swallow thickly, pushing away my ugliest, most painful, memories.

“I guess I felt some of those emotions again when Andrew blindsided me,” I conclude. Because that much of the truth I can speak—Andrew leaving me for Lisa scratched at an old wound that’s buried deep in me but smarted the second it was prodded again.

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