Eliza POV:
Drake finally looked up from his phone, his eyes scanning over my arm with a detached, clinical gaze, as if assessing a minor crack in the plaster. The skin was already blistering, an angry red map of pain.
"Fine," he sighed, the word heavy with martyrdom. "I' ll take you to urgent care."
It wasn' t an offer of comfort. It was a concession, an annoyance he had to deal with before he could get back to more important things. I nodded numbly, the pain a low thrumming that was quickly escalating into a roar.
I followed him out to his car, a sleek, black Tesla that was his pride and joy. As I slid into the passenger seat, my eyes landed on a small, glittery pink air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. It was shaped like the letter 'K' and smelled cloyingly of strawberries and vanilla.
Drake saw me looking at it. He fumbled to unhook it, his movements jerky and panicked. "It' s from Kandace. A joke gift. For the merger. It' s stupid, I' ll take it down."
"It' s cute," I said, my voice a monotone. The pain in my arm was a rising tide, washing out all other emotions.
A tense silence filled the car. He kept glancing at me, his brow furrowed in confusion. "You' re not… going to throw it out the window?"
The old Eliza would have. She would have ripped it from the mirror and flung it into the night, a small, pathetic act of defiance. She would have screamed at him, demanded to know why another woman' s initial was hanging in their shared space.
"Why would I do that?" I asked, genuinely curious. "It' s your car, Drake. You can hang whatever you want in it."
I turned to look out the window, the city lights blurring past. The pain was making me nauseous. "Can you please just drive? The clinic closes in an hour."
He stomped on the accelerator, the Tesla lurching forward. We drove for five minutes in that suffocating silence before his phone chimed with a custom ringtone-a soft, tinkling melody I' d never heard before.
He answered on speaker. "Kandace? What' s wrong?"
Her voice was small and tearful. "Drake… I don' t feel well. I think the champagne went to my head. My everything is spinning…"
He hung up without saying goodbye to her. He didn' t say a word to me either. He just executed a sharp, illegal U-turn, the tires screeching in protest.
He was heading away from the urgent care.
He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small first-aid kit. He tossed a tube of burn cream and a roll of gauze into my lap.
"Look, I have to go check on Kandace. She lives just around the corner. She gets terrible migraines when she' s stressed. I' ll be back in twenty minutes, tops. You can call a ride-share if you want."
He pulled over to the curb, leaving the car running. He didn' t wait for my response. He was already out the door, jogging toward a brightly lit apartment building, his phone pressed to his ear.
I sat there for an hour. The twenty minutes came and went. The car' s battery was low, and the AC began to sputter, pumping hot, stale air into the small space. The city' s heat wave pressed in on the glass, turning the car into an oven. Sweat trickled down my back, stinging the raw skin on my arm.
My vision started to blur at the edges. The pain was more than I could bear.
I looked at the passenger-side window. I looked at the emergency glass breaker tool I always kept in my purse.
With a shaking hand, I took it out. The sound of the window shattering was the loudest, most liberating sound I had ever heard. A car screeched to a halt beside me, the driver a kind-faced woman with wide, worried eyes.
"My God, are you okay? Do you need a ride to the hospital?"
For the first time that night, tears pricked my eyes. Not for Drake, not for my marriage, but for the simple, unexpected kindness of a stranger.
"Yes," I whispered, my voice cracking. "Yes, please."
