"Want anymore?" I waved the coffee cup at Alison.

She wrinkled her nose. "Nope."

She shut the car door and slid her card in the gas pump, swatting away my hand as I tried to shove my card in her face.

"I got this. Stop it," she said, waving her at me in a go away motion. I jammed my card in my back pocket and tossed the bag full of empty wrappers and coffee cups into the garbage.

"I told you. You're paying for any of this."

"Whatever. I get to check out of being a mom with a struggle bun for a few days. That's my payment." She grinned at me. I'd miss that smile the next few weeks.

I slammed the car door shut. The small vanity mirror in the pull-down sun visor showed my dark under-eye circles close up. I rubbed them, like that would do anything.

I looked wiped out.

The pump beeped, and Bestie was back in the car. "Stop looking at yourself," she commented, without even glancing in my direction. The visor flipped up with a guilty "thwap."

The setting sun glared around the edge of the gas station building, and we squinted as she guided the car back onto the highway.

"Where's the cooler weather? I was told this was part of our deal," she said wryly.

"You have a few thousand feet to go in the air, smartass."

I dropped my head against the headrest and watched the full, leafy trees blur past us as she picked up speed. Don't ask, don't ask, don't ask…

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"Heard anything from Brian?"

I couldn't help myself. It was like a compulsion to ask at this point. A scab I kept picking at, poking to see if it still hurt underneath there.

Her head flopped to me, the familiarly stern eyes piercing me.

"Oh, yes, he declared undying love, I just didn't tell you." She paused as her sarcasm retreated. "Alice, why do you do that?"

A simple question I really should have been able to answer. The truth was, I didn't know what else to fill the void with. I kept asking, knowing full well what the reply would be. I didn't know what else to fill the space with that he'd occupied. There was nothing else left to ask, so I grasped to it like a failing life jacket, taking a few more hopeless gasps.

My eyes didn't leave the horizon. "I don't know."

I could feel her eyes change to worry. Again. I was so tired of being worried and fretted over. Every small event for the past six months had me asking if he'd emerged from his silence to check on me. The answer was always the same, but I kept grasping to the thread with both hands.

She was still waiting for an answer.

"I haven't replaced it with anything." She stayed quiet, waiting for the rest. "I moved past the shock. Now it's more of 'is there anything that will make him refill that spot.'"

"I really hope if there was, you'd tell him to fuck right off down the road."

"Me, too. Sometimes I don't even know it's about him anymore."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"There's this…space. It's like a groove in a piece of wood where my life was. I'm sitting there alone, so there's this…extra space. I don't know how else to describe it. I don't know what to fill it with. I'm stuck in it."

Shame washed over me admitting it.

I wanted to be the jilted ex-wife who cut off her hair, got tattoos and went on some amazing mission of self-discovery.

Instead, I sat stuck. Not sleeping, frozen in time, with muted emotions because they had all been spent on Brian leaving. No, not just leaving…the knowing it was coming. I knew for months, I just hung on until the bitter end. I didn't know how to leave, even when I knew I should.

I jumped slightly as Alison tugged a strand of my hair.

"You won't always be. Stuck, I mean."

Life was seeing to it I moved forward at the moment, though it was happening by going backwards.