SHATTERED GLASS

THE BUS TICKET

Vivienne Marlowe POV

The rain didn't ask permission.

It came down hard and sideways, the way it always did in Hollow Creek in March, like the sky had a personal grievance against everyone standing beneath it. I had been standing beneath it for eleven minutes. I knew because I kept checking my phone, not for the time, but because it gave my hands something to do that wasn't shaking.

I had three things in my bag.

A resignation letter folded into thirds and already soft at the creases from how many times I'd unfolded and refolded it over the past two weeks.

A phone with seventeen missed calls from my mother, which I had not returned, and four from Marcus, which I had not returned either, and one from a number I didn't recognize that had a 503 area code — Meridian City.

A bus ticket.

One way.

The hospital sat behind me, all beige brick and fluorescent sadness. I had worked inside it for three years as an editorial assistant for their internal communications department — a job that had not appeared in any of my childhood visions of my future, and yet had somehow become the entire architecture of my days. I drafted newsletters about infection control protocols. I wrote copy for patient satisfaction surveys. I edited the quarterly staff bulletin, which no one read, and which I had quietly redesigned six months ago because the original layout made my eye twitch, and which the director had taken credit for at the all-hands meeting in January.

I had written a very good resignation letter.

I had not given it to anyone.

It was in my bag.

* * *

The bus stop was half a block from the hospital entrance, under a shelter that did almost nothing against sideways rain. There was one other person waiting — an older woman in a yellow rain slicker that was doing considerably more work than my jacket, which I had bought two years ago believing it was waterproof and had since learned was merely water-resistant, a distinction that felt increasingly meaningful.

She looked at me the way older women sometimes look at younger women who are clearly not okay but are pretending very hard to be — a particular expression that is not pity, exactly, but is adjacent to it.

"That jacket's not doing you any favors," she said.

"No," I agreed. "It's really not."

"You waiting for the 7:15?"

"The 7:40."

She nodded like this was meaningful. "The intercity?"

"Yes."

She looked at my bag. Then at my face. Then back at the street, like she was giving me privacy. "Going somewhere important?"

I thought about that. What was the honest answer? Yes. Terrifyingly so. Or: I don't know. Or: I've been standing here for eleven minutes trying to decide if I'm actually going to get on it.

"Meridian City," I said instead, because that was the factual answer and facts were safe.

She smiled. It was a good smile, the kind that had years behind it. "You look like someone running to something," she said. "Not away from it."

I opened my mouth and then closed it.

I didn't have an answer for that, and she didn't seem to need one, because she turned back to the street and we stood there together in the sideways rain and I thought: is she right? Am I?

Because from where I was standing, it felt an awful lot like both.

* * *

Here is what I was running from, if we're being honest:

A job where I was paid fourteen dollars an hour to do the work of someone earning forty. A mother who had two children and loved one of them in the easy, obvious way and the other in a way that required effort she didn't always have. A town that had collectively decided I was Marcus Marlowe's quiet little sister, as though that was a complete description of a person, as though I did not have a name that was mine first.

Vivienne. I had a name.

And Theo. I was also running from the memory of Theo sitting across from me at the diner on Clement Street eight months ago, cutting his pancakes very carefully and saying, without looking up, that he thought we'd run our course. That I was — and this was the word, the exact word, I have turned it over in my hands so many times it should be smooth by now — "exhausting."

"Exhausting how?" I'd asked.

He'd looked up then. "You think too much, Viv. About everything. It's — I don't know. It wears on a person."

I nodded. I had paid for my half of the check. I had driven home and sat in my car in the parking lot of my apartment building and thought: he is wrong about why, but he is not entirely wrong that I am exhausted. I had spent years making myself small and somehow I was still too much.

That is a specific kind of loneliness.

* * *

The 7:40 arrived four minutes late. I picked up my bag.

And then my phone rang.

Marcus.

I looked at his name on the screen. Four missed calls and now a fifth, live and buzzing in my hand. It was 7:44 in the morning. Marcus did not call before nine unless something was wrong, and something in the way his name looked on the screen — or maybe something in me, the part that had spent years reading the temperature of every room I walked into — made my chest tighten.

I almost answered.

I almost stepped back from the curb.

The bus doors opened with a hydraulic hiss, and the driver looked at me with the particular patience of someone who has places to be, and I thought of the resignation letter in my bag, soft at the creases. I thought of the 503 area code. I thought of the woman in the yellow slicker and what she said.

Running to something.

I hit the decline. I stepped up onto the bus. The doors closed behind me.

I found a window seat. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and watched the rain streak sideways and I did not look at my phone again for forty minutes.

When I did, there was a new message from Marcus. Not a voicemail. A text. Three words.

Call me. Please.

Marcus had never said please to me in his life.

The bus was already on the highway, the lights of Hollow Creek shrinking in the window behind me, and I sat there with his message on my screen and the resignation letter in my bag and thought: something is already wrong.

I just didn't know yet that the wrong thing was me.