Page 52 of Start A War (Saint View Psychos)

I’d be everything my mother had never been.

I’d be free.

* * *

There were seventeen missed calls on my phone when I woke up on Monday morning. They displayed above the twenty-three from the day before.

All of them Caleb.

I wasn’t ready to speak to him. I knew what I had to do. I knew what I wanted to do. And yet I knew myself. I was easily swayed. A doormat.

I couldn’t face Caleb until I was one-hundred-percent sure I wouldn’t let him gaslight me into believing the entire thing was my fault.

I’d been ignoring him all weekend. I’d turned my phone off and stayed out of the house as much as I could. I’d taken myself shopping, to dinner, and then to a late movie. When I’d gotten home on Sunday night, Nichelle said Caleb had been by twice, looking for me.

I’d thanked her and told her I’d call him.

But I hadn’t.

I knew I couldn’t put it off much longer, and I would have to face the music later that day. But I needed to go to work first.

I dug through my closet because nothing felt right. Everything felt like Bethany-Melissa. Polished. Put together. The future wife of a successful businessman.

None of it felt like Bliss.

At the back, I found a pair of jeans I couldn’t remember buying. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d worn denim at all. But I pulled them on, wincing a little at how tight they were, but once I had them buttoned, I grinned at my reflection. I found a black T-shirt in my drawer and partnered it with a jacket and a gray knitted scarf.

I wished I had a pair of Doc Martens like Rebel’s, but I settled for a pair of white running shoes with the promise of scuffing them up a bit on my way into work so they weren’t quite so blindingly white.

“Well,” I said to my reflection. “That’s new.”

I liked it, though. It was casual and young, and I felt cute. The jeans made my ass look good.

It was a change to stare into the mirror and be able to say something nice about my body.

Feeling like a million bucks, even though the outfit probably cost less than a hundred, I jogged downstairs, grabbing a breakfast muffin and a banana from the kitchen before heading for my car.

I cranked up some music—some pop by a girl group Caleb hated because all their songs were squeaky and overexcited. I’d always thought they were catchy but had never said anything because of his disdain for them. Now I turned them up as loud as my car speakers would go and cruised to work with a smile.

Caleb’s infidelity should have had me crying into my cereal for a week, and instead, it had given me everything I hadn’t known I’d needed.

I turned into the daycare center’s parking lot, and my smile widened as Vincent pulled in right behind me. I got out and went to his car, tapping on his window when he was still sitting behind the wheel.

He rolled the window down. “Good morning, Bethany-Melissa.”

He was always very formal in the way he spoke. It was different, but I liked the guy. He was the sort of person who’d probably been labeled ‘weird’ as a kid, and I could relate to feeling like you didn’t fit in. “Good morning, Vincent. Can I ask you something?”

He peered up at me, expression serious. “Yes.”

“Can you call me Bliss?”

He blinked. “But your name is Bethany-Melissa.”

“It is, but I don’t think I want to go by that name anymore. And if you ram it all together and drop a few letters, you get Bliss.”

He mulled the name over in his head for a moment.

“Haven’t you got a nickname?” I asked. “Vinnie maybe?”

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