My Fiance Kissed My Best Friend on Our Fourth Anniversary novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Forty Thousand Views

June reaches the rim at dawn, a ranger takes her fee without a word, and the raw video of the kiss shows Kendra saying Brett promised four years ago.

I did not go home and apologize.

I sat in the gas station lot with the engine off and called my father.

Wayne Sundquist picked up on the second ring, even at midnight.

"June? What's wrong?"

"Dad, I need forty dollars for gas. I can't explain yet."

"I'm sending sixty. Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Is it Brett?"

My throat closed up.

"Yes."

Dad did not say a word for a long moment.

I heard the creak of his kitchen chair, the one he fixed every winter and never replaced.

"I never liked how he looked at the shop door," he said finally. "Like he was pricing it. Drive safe, kiddo."

Sixty dollars landed on my phone before we hung up.

I paid inside, bought a coffee and a bag of pretzels, and drove into the dark.

The road climbed through black pines.

The heater rattled, and snow still lay in banks on both sides.

I said Brett's name once out loud, just to see if it hurt.

It did.

I said Kendra's name, and it hurt worse.

At five in the morning the sky turned the color of dishwater.

I reached the south entrance of Crater Lake National Park with a quarter tank of gas and no plan.

A small booth stood in the road with a light in the window.

A man in a green ranger jacket leaned out of it.

He looked about thirty, with dark hair that needed cutting and the squint of someone who spent his life outdoors.

"Thirty dollars for the vehicle pass," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's a bad morning to be driving up here. The rim road isn't plowed past Discovery Point."

"I'll go as far as it goes."

He looked at my green dress, my thrift-store flats and the snow melting off them.

He looked at my left hand, where a white stripe of skin showed from my ring.

He did not say anything about any of it.

I took thirty dollars out of what was left of my father's money and handed it to him.

His brass name tag said HAUTALA.

He wrote on a paper slip without asking my name, and his pen stopped for half a second over the line where a name would go.

He tore the slip off and passed it through the window without looking at my face.

"Wipers off when you park," he said. "The ice cracks the blades."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Stay on the paved lot."

He slid the window shut.

I drove up the last of the mountain with my hands tight on the wheel.

The lot at Discovery Point was empty and glazed with ice.

I parked, took my cardigan from the back seat and walked to the stone wall at the edge.

Then the lake appeared under me.

It was the deepest blue I had ever seen, so dark it looked poured.

A skin of fog lay across the surface.

Wizard Island sat in the middle, with the rim of the old volcano rising all around.

Brett had said we would watch twilight bleed over it.

He had said it with a candle between us.

I stood there at dawn instead, alone.

It was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I did not cry.

My phone buzzed.

I had thirty-one messages.

Most were from numbers I did not know, and the top one was a video.

The sender was a woman from the party, an acquaintance from church who had once told me my braid looked nice.

"I thought you should have the whole thing," she had written. "Not the cut one going around. I'm so sorry."

I pressed play.

It started in the cloakroom door, shaky, from behind my own shoulder.

I watched myself walk in.

I watched Brett jerk back and Kendra straighten her dress.

Then the video kept going.

It did not stop when I left.

The woman had followed me to the door and then turned back to the cloakroom.

Brett had his hands over his face.

Kendra was fixing her lipstick in the compact mirror.

"She'll cry for a day, and then she'll come home," Kendra said.

"I told you we should have told her," Brett said.

"You said you'd tell her after her birthday."

Her voice was flat and bored.

"That was four years ago, Brett."

The video ended.

I stood very still with the cold climbing my legs.

Four years ago was my eighteenth birthday.

The night of the candle.

I played it again, and then I played it a third time.

Then I opened Kendra's page, because I could not stop myself.

She had posted twelve minutes ago.

It was a photo of a velvet ring box, snapped shut, with her hand holding it.

The caption said only, "He finally chose."

Under it a counter read forty thousand views.

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