Chapter Text
Then.
It’d been snowing.
She’d been no stranger to snow; she liked it, in all honesty. She thought there was something romantic about it, something clean, crisp, something innately pure at its core. A blank slate, tabula rasa, a blank page ready to be filled with perfectly pressed footprints and uncharted, unwritten stories.
But, for as long as she could remember, she’d never been any good at balancing herself in it. She blamed her mother and her good intentions, who’d always insisted on dressing her up in little buoyant snow boots and puffy jackets so big and with so much insulation that she’d invariably tip over to one side or the other, rolling around like a tortoise on its shell, unable to move, unable to stand.
Her ineptitude in the snow hadn’t even been a working theory, because at the ripe old age of eighteen, balance fully formed, she’d wiped out while running across Washington Square Park, cartoon-like, legs kicking up in the air in either direction as she squealed and landed hard on her tailbone for all of New York to see.
She couldn't walk in the snow to save her life, let alone run; it hadn't been a theory, so much as a known, bona fide fact.
But she'd been late so she’d thought she'd give it a shot.
“Hey,” she'd said, slowing her jog over to the bench and sitting down with a wince and an out-of-breath huff. “I'm so sorry."
He'd flipped his book closed and looked up at her. “Didn't notice," he'd said with an easy smile. “Everything okay?"
He'd definitely seen her fall, she gathered from his tone, and had just chosen to save her from further embarrassment by bringing it up in the most innocuous way possible.
“Oh, fine," she'd said quickly, brushing the snow off the back of her coat. “Spec meeting just ran over. You know how it is, the editors get a kick out of hearing their own voices."
She'd never been all that great a liar – she has no poker face – but he'd let this one slide, too. Her meeting hadn't run over, not by a long shot, but she hadn't wanted to admit the real reason why she'd been a thirty-minute no-show – she'd taken the wrong subway and ended up in Brooklyn.
“Hey, how'd your pitch go?” he'd asked, tapping her wrist with the spine of his book.
She'd sighed. “Not great. Got stuck with copy-editing again."
"Next issue, then. You'll get there."
“I know.”
She hadn't known that at all.
“Hey,” he’d said, zeroing right in on her doubt and tipping her chin up to catch her gaze. “You’ll get there. You'll get there because you're Betty Cooper, and you always find your way."
She’d managed a small smile. She could tell he was freezing despite the brave front he'd put on, and she didn't want to dwell on it any longer, either. Her failures were her own and there was nothing for her to do but to move on and try again, and harder this time.
“Come on.” She’d slipped her gloved hand into his, pulling him off the bench. He'd waited long enough. “Pizza's on me tonight."
But he'd stopped her, his hand firm in hers as he tugged her still. “Jug, what are you-”
“Here,” he’d said. “I found it on the bench.”
“What is it?” She'd twirled the playing card over between her fingers.
The two of hearts.
She didn’t know much about cards other than how to play Go-Fish with Polly’s twins. She didn’t gamble because she’d always been the risk adverse type, but there’d been a certain inexplicable beauty in the stark red symbols across the card’s face that had all but mesmerized her.
He’d shrugged, the apples of his cheeks as red as the twin hearts on the card. “You'll get that byline soon, and anything else you want in life. You’re a safe bet, Betts," he'd said almost shyly, smiling at the alliteration. “I'd bet my heart on you.”
Now.
It doesn’t feel like a break-up.
All she can think while it’s happening is that it doesn’t really feel like a break-up. There’s no shouting; no wild accusations being flung around – no one’s cheated, no one’s found someone else, no one is moving across the country. There are no tears. There’s no screaming.
She doesn’t even know if there’s any heartbreak.
She remembers – back when they were sixteen and feeling everything she’d thought a human body capable of feeling – it’d been like her soul had been ripped from her when he’d walk away, like her entire existence slipped away with him as her fingers slipped through the worn leather of his jacket. It’d been like death itself when he told her it was all for the best, that he was doing it to protect her, that she’d understand why one day.
It doesn’t feel like that now.
It feels like nothing now.
“So, uh, my Keurig,” she says, voice raspy and cracking through the silence. The sound startles her – it's coarse and affected, and not at all like her. “I know you like to use it, and so does Archie,” she trails off, unable to bring herself to say the words I’d like it back. This whole line of conversation feels rude, nonsensical even, because shouldn’t they be talking about something else, anything else other than her incredibly unimportant, replaceable coffee-maker?
But, she reasons, they have talked about everything else – how it’s not working anymore, how they’re not going to make this awkward for their friends, how they’re going to be mature adults about this and agree to cut off all communication because it’d just be too hard otherwise – and this was all that remained.
The coffee-maker.
She wonders if divorce is at all similar to this – coming together and dividing up assets based on who loves the wedding china more or who used what credit card to buy the flat screen TV. Maybe there’s even more feeling in divorce. Maybe there’s more screaming, more shouting, tears – more of anything beyond two people watching for the other’s reaction through the black mirror of the television screen with an ocean of couch cushions in between.
He clears his throat then and she thinks it might be preamble for something profound, something finally meaningful.
It’s not.
“I’ll bring it over,” he says softly, staring down at his hands resting on his knees. “And the rest of your stuff.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Oh, and my black heels, the ones with the-”
“Are in the back of my closet,” he finishes. “I’ll grab those, too.”
She doesn’t really know why she’s so focused on any of the very replaceable things she’s choosing this moment to think about. This is the moment, she thinks, this is the only moment, the last moment they have to talk about what went wrong, to wax poetic about enduring, endless love, to cry, to scream, and here she is thinking about her stuff.
Stuff she doesn’t even like.
“My PlayStation,” he blurts out, so suddenly and so loudly that it makes her jump. “I, uh... it’s still...”
“I’ll bring it back,” she says quickly. “We can - I don’t know - find a date that works and just swap things? Or-”
“That works,” he interrupts. “We can... yeah.”
The silence is deafening. It’s been an entire night of silence and half-sentences at best, and at this point, she’s thinking seriously about screaming into the void just to hear something louder than her own heartbeat thumping in her ear, the chimes of the elevator down the hall, his breathing – his goddamn quiet breathing – all the way across the couch.
There’s a part of her that’s tempted to ask, just to make sure, if they’re actually really and truly done because she’s realizing now that it wasn’t really made clear – but her beats her to the punch.
“So, we’re good?” he asks.
It’s an oxymoron, she thinks about saying. They’re not a we anymore, so by definition doesn’t that mean that they’re not ‘good?' Isn’t that the very definition of 'bad?” But they’re also sitting here calmly, discussing things rationally, and in some universe she thinks that must qualify as good, at least from an objective standpoint.
“I think so,” she whispers back. It’s not what she’s thinking.
I’m sorry, she thinks, I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you but I think you wanted this, too. It’s me, it really is, it isn’t you – it definitely isn’t anyone else, either. I don’t know how there’s ever going to be.
I’m going to miss you, I think.
I know.
What I don't know is how I'm going to learn to stop loving you.
He falters for a moment, rocking his weight from his toes to his heels, building up the strength to move from the heaviness of the silence. When he does, his entire body seems to roll through the space like a thunderstorm over the prairie, breezing past her and swirling up the quiet like the crash of a wave against the shore. It happens so suddenly that she doesn’t even have time to pull her legs back, and he bumps into them while striding to the door.
“Sorry,” she mumbles; he shakes his head in return. It’s okay, she reads. But he doesn’t spare her so much as a glance.
His hand pauses on the doorknob, and it hits her then that for the first time in years he’s about to walk out right out without so much as a hug or a kiss goodbye. He turns back to her, frowning like he’s forgotten something, and she thinks that he’s realized it, too.
She wonders if he will, if he’ll double back and hug her or kiss her just once more for old time’s sake. That would be okay, she thinks, after all they’ve gone through. A goodbye kiss, or a goodbye hug. That would be okay.
He looks at her, hand tightly wound around the doorknob but, not angrily, not even unkindly - just with that same nothingness that has permeated this heavy, horrible night. “I’ll let you know what day works to swap stuff. Or you can let me know,” he says.
Wait, she thinks. Wait.
But for what?
She squares her shoulders and nods once, curtly. “I’ll let you know.”
“Bye, Betts.”
And just like that, he’s out of her door.
Just like that, he’s out of her life.
She had thought that she’d feel more once he actually left, that the presence of his absence would suddenly kick her heart into high gear, or at the very least, kick her tear ducts into action. But she’s been watching the minutes tick by, watching the numbers change from eights to nines on the stove clock for a full hour and there’s been nothing.
It’s frustrating to wait for a feeling, she thinks, frustrating to wait for the heartbreak she’d suited up in armor to tackle, the heartbreak that now seems to be completely eluding her.
Something comes at 8:37. It isn’t heartbreak, but it’s something, spurred by the sound system sitting unassumingly underneath the flat screen, a gift from Veronica to Veronica.
“You know there's this thing called the Geek Squad and they'd gladly do this for you, right? They actually call themselves that because they enjoy doing stuff like this, unlike me,” he’d said, staring down the two cable wires he'd held in either hand.
“Yes, well, the onus shouldn’t be on me if you and Archie can’t figure out how to set up something that says ‘easy installation guaranteed' on the box," Veronica had retorted.
“You know, I'm actually looking at the box and-"
“Okay," she’d interrupted, plucking the manual from Veronica’s hands. “We’re obviously getting nowhere.”
“It doesn’t say that on the box, Betty,” he’d muttered to her under Veronica’s heavy glare.
“I know,” she’d said softly, patting his knee. “Don't worry. You’re still the smartest guy I know, big brains, etcetera, etcetera.”
“I know you’re placating me, but it’s working. Feel free to say more things like that.”
“Do you have cable D? ” she'd asked, bringing the manual close to her face. “The dots inside the metal part look like a face.”
“How romantic,” he’d deadpanned.
“I’m sorry. I meant, do you have cable D, D as in my darling Jughead, light of my life, without whom I’d be lost without?” She’d already been snickering halfway through – they'd never been the terms of endearment types.
“Oh, that cable D? Here,” he’d said. “Although for future reference, I think the official NATO D is delta.”
“Hmm,” she’d hummed back, matching his smirk with one of her own. “Just as romantic.”
It’s 8:42 when she realizes that she won’t be able to look at that sound system without thinking about that memory, and then she’s suddenly on her feet, pulling manically at the PlayStation’s wires because she thinks that it’s for the best that she gets that thing out of sight and out of mind before she starts walking down memory lane there, too.
She figures the sound system has to stay, though, since it technically is Veronica’s.
She takes the PlayStation straight to her room and drops it in a box she’d been planning to use to return her textbook rentals. She’ll find another, she thinks, because this trumps any need she has to get her rentals back to the warehouse on time. She doesn’t want to see the PlayStation right now.
She can’t see any of his things right now.
There isn’t much in her room that stick out as glaringly his, but there’s enough. She grabs what’s most instantly obvious to her – a few books on the nightstand, a pair of tangled headphones on the desk – and then she’s ransacking her closet and drawers for any other hint of him, throwing out her neatly folded clothes behind her onto the floor in a heap of cashmere, wool, and rising emotions she’s trying to quell because she doesn’t want to miss anything, doesn’t want to find something of his hiding in between hers months after she’s thought she’s removed all trace of him.
It can’t stay, she thinks frantically. It all has to go – none of it can stay.
Her hands still when she comes to the contents of her wallet spilled out over her desk, a messy collection of bills and various ID cards; when she sees it, her heart catches and lurches against her so hard that it has her rubbing at her chest.
No.
Not this, she thinks, gently brushing her fingers over the worn two of hearts. Anything but this.
It’s what she’d keep out of all the random pieces of him she has left, of all the symbols and tokens of a man she’s reducing to the contents of a box and mere memory.
This is what she’d keep over the worn copy of On the Road he kept on his side of the bed to read when he couldn’t fall asleep, over the flannel stuffed in one of her drawers that he’d left one morning in a rush out the door to get to his ten a.m. because he’d been so lost in her, over his worn hoodie she liked to wear on nights he didn’t stay over because it smelled like him, a poor substitute for his arms around her, but better than nothing.
She’s tucked away the playing card in her wallet for years, a strong and always constant reminder that someone believed in her, that someone loved her, that she mattered as much to him as he did to her. Two hearts on the same page, equals in love and equals in life.
Just this one thing. I could keep just this one thing, he’d never know.
But she would know. She would look at it when she was feeling sad, turn it over and over again in her hands, wonder what he was doing right then and there in that very moment. Maybe in a moment of anger, she’d even think about defacing it, debate whether or not she should take a permanent marker to its face and black-out the second heart in an instant of irrevocable, spiteful vindictiveness that no one but him and her would understand the significance of.
She sighs wetly, blowing instead of breathing out her exhale as she drops the card into the box, feeling her heart sink with it as it flutters between his clothes and books, slipping between the cracks and disappearing out of sight.
She hopes he doesn’t throw it away. She doesn’t have any claim to it anymore, but she wishes that there was a way she could tell him to keep it because it'd been so completely meaningful to her that it deserved a better home than the trashcans of New York City. She wishes that she could tell him that even though she’s sure the memory of it will hurt, maybe for a long time, maybe longer than any of the other memories she’s collected in the box, that one day it won’t anymore. That maybe he’ll want this piece of her heart one day after all the dust has settled, a reminder of how completely and truly she loves him.
After the pillage and ransack of her room, it’s still quiet. Unnervingly quiet.
She crouches down with the box at her feet, cups her hands over her ears, and screams as loudly as she can, the sound ripping at her throat; screams until she tastes the nauseating, metallic tang of blood and bile building at the back of her throat, screams until her head is dizzyingly light and her chest is heaving with wasted breath, wasted energy.
Even as she collapses onto her bed, spent and gulping in air by the mouthful, she’s not at all surprised that the echo of her screams does nothing – absolutely nothing at all – in the way of breaking the harrowing silence she can’t escape.
When she hears the sound of footsteps approaching the front door and keys twisting in the lock, she wakes with a start and a snort, legs kicking out in either direction. It takes her a minute to register where she is because she’s fallen asleep at the wrong end of the bed with her feet on either pillow, and it’s a disorienting angle.
It’s a disorienting night, if she’s being honest with herself.
It all comes crashing back to her when she sits up and pulls the hair-tie out of her lopsided ponytail. She’s Betty Cooper, newly single-girl in New York City; she is free. She is unbridled and has the world at her disposal. She is a wild thing, or at least, she has the potential to be.
She doesn’t know who she’s kidding.
She is a power-napper extraordinaire at nine on a Friday night with sleep lines etched deep into her cheeks, and there’s nothing remotely wild about that.
She’s the roommate who left the Sad Boyfriend Box on the entryway table where Veronica tosses her keys because she doesn’t know how else to admit to the world, or at the very least, to Veronica, that she’s now just her, by herself, party of one.
She hears Archie’s voice before she does Veronica’s. He sounds happy, she thinks; they both do, and she resents herself for resenting that they’re so happy right now when she’s not. She hadn’t planned on telling Archie tonight – she’d figured that they’d each play man-to-man with their own roommates instead of her bearing the burden of an all-out double-team.
It takes them longer than she had expected for them to notice the box – or maybe it takes them just the right amount of time and she’s far too self-centered to think they’d notice it right off the bat. They have each other to pay attention to, she reasons, their own love to get wrapped up in and their own problems to occupy their time. She may have been Jughead’s first thought, but she’s definitely Archie and Veronica’s second.
But she catches the exact moment they do clue in, Archie’s loud “oh, shit,” carrying through the distance to her room, followed by loud murmuring, loud as enough that feels like she’s standing right next to them, heart naked and exposed – did they break up, did they not, did you know about this, did you not.
The front door opens and slams shut again.
She thinks that there’s a good chance it’s Archie hurrying home to make sure that his own roommate is okay, which means that Veronica will be in charge of taking care of her tonight and she’ll be knocking on her door soon. That’s okay, she thinks, it’s even preferable. Of the two, Veronica is likely to be less invasive than Archie, and that’s what she wants right now – to not talk about it, or at the very least, to talk about it as calmly and as rationally as possible, without the but why’s, no really, but why’s Archie would likely throw her way.
She sits up on the bed and waits, counting her breaths. She thought she’d removed all trace of him, but she hadn’t bargained for the emptiness that now sticks out like red paint splashed across a white wall – the dusty outline where his book had been, the empty drawer full of S shirts and flannels, the piece of her heart she’d packed up haphazardly and sent away with the cardboard box.
She thinks it’s funny – a horribly ironic kind of funny – how emptiness can in some twist of fate be the biggest presence of all.
She can tell from the shadows swinging under the crack of her door that Veronica floats by her door a good three or four times before knocking, but she understands the hesitation. It isn’t in Veronica’s natural instinct to be a comforter – she’s a straight shooter and tells it exactly like it is.
Which is why she thinks Veronica’s pacing right now because this isn’t exactly night where she can shoot it straight.
“I come bearing good wine,” Veronica says, holding up the bottle, worried smile pulling at her lips. Betty has learned the translation long ago - good wine means stolen from Hiram’s wine collection and this is a serious occasion. Bad wine means I bought it from the two-buck chuck section at Trader Joes and I’m looking to get wine-drunk, sing Shania Twain songs off-key, and not feel guilty if I happen to throw this up in a few hours.
She doesn’t really feel like drinking right now, good or bad wine. Getting horribly wasted is such a break-up cliché, and she’s been doing a pretty good job of avoiding all of those tonight. But she also knows that “good wine” is Veronica’s way of expressing the whole I’m here for you, I’m trying to be a good friend sentiment and she thinks that she probably shouldn’t shun that right now since, because as of officially three hours ago, she’s now down a best friend and boyfriend.
“Thanks,” she says, moving over on her bed.
“So,” Veronica begins, sitting down on the edge cautiously. “There’s a box outside.”
She takes a swig straight from the bottle. “There’s a box outside,” she confirms.
“And does that box mean-”
“Yep.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Another swig, then she passes the bottle back to Veronica. “No,” she admits. “I don’t want to talk about it. But I’ll answer questions.” There’s a difference – there is – even if Veronica doesn’t understand it.
Talking about it means that she has to analyze her own feelings, accept them, and make them real to herself – and the fact of the matter is that she just doesn’t know what exactly what she’s feeling right now. She doesn’t think it’s heartbreak, and she doesn’t think it’s sadness either – if she has to put a word to it she supposes it’s close to numbness, but that doesn’t seem like the right sentiment for a moment like this.
Shouldn’t she be sad, after all these years? Shouldn’t she be on the floor surrounded by piles of his stuff, weeping about all that could’ve been and all that won’t be, shouldn’t she be belting out I Will Always Love You on repeat until her neighbors call the cops on her for disturbing the peace?
Why isn’t she?
She’s also pretty sure that Veronica thinks she’s feeling all these sad things right now, and what does that say about her as a person if she admits that she’s feeling more or less fine?
Questions, though, questions she can answer objectively. There’s a direction to questions, an angle, a guiding path that isn’t just the waywardness of the unformed mess of thoughts running through her head.
“Questions,” Veronica says, kicking off her heels, and Betty thinks then that Veronica just might understand her. “Okay. Are you okay?”
She takes a deep breath before nodding slowly, her whole upper body rocking along with her. “I think so. I’ll be okay.”
“Did he hurt you? Do you want me to kill him?”
She chuckles shortly at the last one, and then abruptly stops because she realizes that Veronica might have the means to make that happen, or at least Hiram Lodge might, and she doesn’t want Veronica getting the wrong idea.
“No, V. He didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. Definitely don’t kill him.”
“What happened?”
It’s blunt, but then again, so is Veronica. And it feels good, she thinks, the directness after all the indirectness and half-sentences that had been spoken tonight.
“He came over, we sat on the couch. I said that I didn’t think that this – I didn’t think that we were right anymore. He agreed and we said we’d give all our stuff back.”
She doesn’t know why she’s so focused on the goddamn stuff. She supposes it’s easier to think about her things because the alternative is thinking about them and what had gone wrong, where exactly in the convoluted timeline they’d broken down, if she’d given up to easily on them – on him. And that’s exactly what she doesn’t want to think about.
“Betty,” Veronica encourages softly, and it’s all that it takes for every single thought she didn’t know she had to come tumbling out of her mouth.
“I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore, V. I feel so lost sometimes. He was everything I could’ve asked for. He made me feel so loved, and I was safe with him; I always felt so safe.”
She exhales then, her breath catching the edge of the wine bottle and whistling. It’s a pretty sound she thinks, a little sad and melancholy, hollow, but still – pretty.
“But I don’t know who I am without him, and I’m can’t stand that. I don’t know what things I like, things I like just for me, by myself, because I everything that I’ve done in the past six years has been with him. I don’t know how to stand on my own two feet because he’s always standing there with me. I don’t know what it’s like to be just Betty Cooper anymore, because all that I am is Jughead’s girlfriend.”
It’s a whisper now, her voice low and reserved because she doesn’t want to admit what comes next.
“How can I be with him if I don’t even know who I am?”
She wonders how much of her stream of consciousness made sense to Veronica, the girl who first and foremost takes care of no one else but herself. She remembers how she’d swept into Riverdale like a storm in the night, full of power, unapologetic. Confident and sure, the girl who took off her pearls for no one because that’d been who she was, who she still is. She doesn’t think that Veronica has ever not known exactly who she is down to her bones, and Betty thinks sometimes it’s why she has such an easy time standing up for herself – she knows exactly what she’s standing up for.
“Do you still love him?”
The wine bottle stops halfway to her lips; it hadn’t been the question she’d been expecting.
She thinks the right answer is no – no because they’ve broken up, no because she’d thought that when the relationship stopped, the love would, too.
“Yes,” she admits, because the right answer isn’t necessarily the true answer. “But I don’t think that love is ever enough just on its own.”
“No,” Veronica says softly. “I don’t think it is either. You have to know yourself, B, and you have to be happy with who you are.”
Veronica squeezes her arm, and she thinks then how glad she is that she’s gotten Veronica instead of Archie tonight. She loves Archie with her whole heart and then some, but Archie doesn’t have a clue about when or how of when to back off, at least about things like this.
She remembers how Veronica had once said to her that she wasn’t good at ‘the whole comforting thing.’
She thinks now that even if that had been true then, she’s come a long way since.
She wakes again with a start – it’s pitch black this time, save for the dull glow of her laptop sitting open on the bed, and when she sees Veronica’s sleeping face across from hers, her instinct is almost to shove her off the bed in shock because hers is not the raven-haired face she’s become used to seeing on the other pillow. She supposes that this another thing she’ll have to get used to – sleeping alone at night – although she’s sure that somewhere out there, Reggie Mantle’s head is exploding at the image of her and Veronica passed out in the same bed after polishing off the good wine. The stuff of his wildest dreams and all that.
Veronica’s hand is still strewn across the keyboard, and Betty carefully slides the computer out from under her and walks it to her desk. She can’t remember when she’d fallen asleep, but she thinks it probably had something to do with what looks like the latest episode of The Bachelor pulled up on the computer screen – it’s like a lullaby for her, she never makes it past the first fifteen minutes as hard as she tries.
When she exits out of the screen, she wishes then that she’d just left it well enough alone, because the one thing she hadn’t been able to stuff into the sad box sitting out on the entryway table stares right back at her – their four shining, smiling faces on her twenty-first birthday in front of some bar in Brooklyn she doesn’t even remember the name of.
“Jug, come on," she’d said, sidling up to him with the courage of a few Irish Car Bombs behind her. “Just one where it doesn’t look like I’ve told you the Shake Shack on campus is closing tomorrow.”
“I’d look at lot worse than this if that were true, trust me," he’d said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. She'd loved it when he held her like that – strong and sure, steady, like he had nowhere else he'd rather be.
“Do you think you'd cry?" she'd asked through a hiccup.
Too many Irish Car Bombs.
He'd rolled his eyes at her. “No, I don't think I'd cry."
“What if all the Shake Shacks in New York closed? Do you think you'd cry then?"
“I'd be upset, sure, but-"
“All the Shake Shacks in the world closed?"
“Betty, this conversation's making me want to cry," he'd said, his smile betraying his words.
She hadn’t been looking and she’d just been barely aware of the camera’s flash out of the corner of her eye – his smile, fleeting and rare, was infinitely more beautiful to behold.
They look happy in the picture, she thinks, tracing the outline of them on her screen. They look like the world could fall apart around them as long as they were left standing, they look like they’re so in love.
She corrects herself almost as soon as she’s thought it. Not looks. They had been so in love – the honest-to-god, cross my heart and hope to die kind of love – and it would be unfair to diminish any of what had come before tonight; it would be an insult to him, because there hadn’t been a moment she’d once doubted that he loved her.
“I’m here for you, B,” Veronica mumbles with a feeble, tired lift of her hand, flipping over on the bed. Veronica’s voice is quiet and slurred, but it’s enough to make her jump - she's not used to this, not used to Veronica's voice lulling through her dark room.
She could shake Veronica awake and help her stumble back to her posturepedic, memory foam mattress, and there’s a part of her that knows that Veronica would probably appreciate it if she did. But there’s a bigger part of her that wants Veronica’s company now, that wants just for one more night to have someone’s weight on the other side of her bed before it’s just her alone in it, learning how to not reach out to pull his arm around hers in the still of the night, learning how to cross the great divide of the halfway line between her side and what had once been his. Learning how to sleep alone, to be alone.
Tomorrow, she’ll deal with falling asleep with only her own thoughts for company. Tomorrow, she’ll change her desktop picture to the one of her and Polly’s twins at a bowling alley, she likes that picture a lot, too, and it’s as good a replacement as any other picture. Tomorrow, she’ll figure out how and when to give him the sad box of stuff.
Tomorrow, she’ll start finding that missing person she’d once known as Betty Cooper.