I knew I needed to get off the couch.

It was just that getting off the couch seemed to require about a thousand more muscles than I had ever possessed.

Not to mention motivation.

I slumped back into the cushions and stared up at the dingy grey ceiling. It was a slightly less depressing sight than the melting, half-eaten carton of dulce de leche ice cream on the coffee table, or the many used tissues at my feet, or the tearstained face that would greet me if I sat up high enough to see myself in the mirror over the mantel.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Hunter.

His face when we had last spoken, so cold, so uncaring, so carved from stone as he told me that he never wanted to see me again—

No, no, no! I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to wallow. Maybe I couldn’t summon the emotional energy to get off this damn couch, but I could damn well make myself forget about Hunter Knox and my stupid, stupid mistake.

Somehow.

Alcohol was right out of the question; even the shittiest liquor just conjured up the taste of Knox bourbon in my memory, and the taste of Hunter’s lips following that. Sugar wasn’t doing such a hot job either, not that I hadn’t tried several variations on that: in addition to the ice cream that was rapidly turning to soup, my fridge sported stale donuts, brownies, a mostly-empty tub of chocolate chip cookie dough (don’t judge), and a churro I’d bought last week that was now so tough that I probably could have repurposed it as a chew toy for a pit bull.

I should probably throw it all away.

But that would mean getting off this couch.

And what use were ‘should’s, anyway? I should have never gotten drunk at that party. I should never have spoken to Chuck. I should have told Hunter right away, so he wouldn’t be blindsided, so he would have had time to forgive me.

Should, should, should.

It was all so fucking useless. Like me.

After the failure of alcohol and sugar, my next step had been to buy a handful of the supermarket tabloids with the silliest headlines I could find. WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO BAT-APE HYBRID and ALIEN ARTIFACT REAWAKENS ELVIS and all that; Paige and I used to steal these from the local Publix and laugh ourselves silly. Mom would’ve died if she’d found out.

I picked up one of them half-heartedly, but its headlines were all celebrity hook-ups and break-ups—MADONNA SPOTTED IN SIZZLING ROMANCE WITH MEMBER OF SICILIAN MAFIA??, THE PRESIDENT’S SHOCKING SECRET, JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT TEARFULLY ADMITS HER HOARDING PROBLEM CAUSED WRECK OF HER MARRIAGE—and all they did to my stupid brain was remind me of my own hook-up and break-up, and how no one would ever really care about it the way millions of people apparently cared about these ones. No one would care about it except me.

Hunter would never care.

I let the magazine fall to the floor, to settle in with the rest of the debris of my life.

I picked up the phone, partly out of unthinking habit, partly on the off chance that somehow its ring tone had been turned off and Hunter had called me back fourteen times, finally ready to hear my explanations and apologies.

He had not.

In the two weeks since he’d told me to pack my things and leave, he hadn’t called me once. And he certainly hadn’t been taking any of my calls. And I had made calls. Sober calls, drunk calls, tearful calls, angry calls. Nothing had garnered a response.

I dug my spoon back into the melting mess of dulce de leche ice cream and glomped it into my mouth. It tasted like nothing at all, but it settled low and hard in my stomach, like a stone, like defeat.

Ring, ring!

My heart leapt in agonized joy, then fell again with a nearly audible thud as I looked at the caller ID. It wasn’t Hunter.

Of course it wasn’t Hunter. He’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in hearing from me again. Stupid, stupid, stupid to have imagined that he might have missed me, that he might have changed his mind.

Worse, the call wasn’t even from Paige or Martha, who had been checking in with me once every few days, trying to sound offhand and casual before inviting me out to ladies’ nights at local bars, or picnics with the historical society, or brunch with just the two of us—trying to pry me out of my protective shell and get me back into the real world, offers which I had all politely—and in a few more persistent cases, not so politely—declined. Couldn’t a girl just wallow in peace anymore?

But like I said, the phone call wasn’t from them.

It was from my boss.

Letting it go through to voicemail would probably lose me my job at this point, so I picked up the phone and tried to sound like I had been doing something marginally more professional than lying around on my couch crying and eating ice cream.

“Yes, sir?”

“I know you’ve taken another sick day—” there was a contemptuous emphasis on the ‘another’—“but I need you to come in today, in an hour. Marianne is out with the flu and somebody’s got to cover her workload.”

My heart leapt again before I could remember that Marianne was the name of the other woman in the department, and she didn’t get any great jobs either. Still, there was a tiny strand of hope left: “And the Knox account?”

He laughed, a hard hacking sound that was only barely recognizable as mirth. “Don’t kid yourself, Allison. After the hash you made of it last time, there’s no way I’m letting you more than forty miles near that one.”

I felt the sinking sensation of worthlessness in my stomach as he spoke. He was right. I ruined everything I touched—no! No, I couldn’t let myself think things like that. I had to fight.

I tried to rally. “Well, I could work on the Jefferson accounts, or pitch for the Insignia deal, I’ve done a lot of research on—”

“Stick to what you know,” he sneered. “You’re lucky you did moderately well with the hygiene products last year, or you’d be out on your ass right now. There’s a new tampon line to work on, and with Marianne out with the flu you can come in and look it over, see if you can manage something simple.”

And then he hung up on me.

He’d never done that before. He’d been dismissive, sure, but he’d coated it in polite phrases and sweet-sounding sentiments. This…contempt…that was new.

It probably meant he was getting ready to fire me.

I tried to make myself feel something about this as I slowly stood, trying to remember where I’d last seen my purse and keys and everything else I’d need to make it into work. All my hopes and dreams were about to go up in smoke. I should have felt crushed.

But I already felt crushed.

This…this was just a grain of sand on top of the mountain that was already crushing me.

I thought about Hunter. I couldn’t help it; it just came to me in one painful flash: his smiling face, his strong arms, the partial glimpses of his past and the silence that hadn’t shut me out but had invited me in, invited me to really open up and let someone else in for the first time.

But now it was all over.

My career was on its way to being all over too.

And I had absolutely no idea how to turn any of it around.