ARIA'S POV
I sat in my car for eleven minutes before I started the engine.
I know it was eleven minutes because I watched the clock on the dashboard without meaning to, the numbers changing in that slow, indifferent way that clocks changed when you weren't ready to move but also weren't ready to stay.
The coffee shop was behind me. Dominic was still in it. Somewhere in there he was sitting at a table with a ring in front of him and his cold coffee and I had walked out and I had meant it and my left hand on the steering wheel felt like a stranger's hand, bare and cold and entirely mine again.
I drove home the long way.
Not deliberately at first. I just took wrong turns, or turns that weren't wrong exactly but were longer, and I let the car carry me through streets I knew without needin
