After I Fully Prepared for the Apocalypse, the Ungrateful Cried with Regret novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Forty Guests
At her own engagement party Robin's mother, sister and fiancé declare her sick and push papers across a table; she walks out, and her gate camera shows Troy's brothers cutting her chain for a buyer he already has.
My mother tapped her fork against a wine glass at my engagement party and asked forty people for a minute of quiet.
The string lights were on in her backyard. The cake was still uncut.
She had baked it herself.
At the door she had pressed a cardigan into my hands in case the evening turned cool.
"We love Robin more than anything," Mom said. "That's why we can't keep watching her do this to herself."
Somebody's laugh stopped halfway.
My little sister stood up from table four and raised her phone. Her thumb was already on the red button.
"It's for the family album," she whispered when I looked at her.
"Since her father died, Robin has been buying grain silos and canned food," Mom went on. "Every weekend she counts cans. She says the world ends on the twenty-eighth."
It was the twenty-third.
The end was five days away. I had told them once, and I had never said it again.
"Dad's notebook says the twenty-eighth," I said. "I believed him."
"Your father was a tired man, sweetheart," Mom said gently, and her eyes filled. "He wrote a lot of things down at the end."
My fiancé stepped up beside her with a folded paper.
Troy Lowry was a loan officer at Corwin Savings. He had eaten Sunday dinner at my table for three years.
"Beverly, let me do this part," Troy said. "I'm going to read it so nobody can say we hid anything."
He read it off his phone in his bank voice.
I had spent four hundred and twelve thousand dollars on a grain co-op, four concrete silos and a warehouse of food. It was my father's life insurance and every dollar I had saved since I was twenty-two.
Forty faces turned toward me while he read.
Nobody looked surprised. Somebody had already told every one of them.
On the folding table by the garage sat two stacks of paper and a pen.
"The first is a thirty-day stay at a lovely place with a garden," Mom said. "Nobody is taking you anywhere you don't agree to go."
"And the second?" I asked.
"A power of attorney," Troy said. "So I can handle your accounts while you rest."
At the end of table six sat a man in a grey coat who hadn't touched his dinner.
He wasn't a guest. I had never seen him before.
"That's Nolan Kearns," Mom said. "He's the specialist who'll drive you."
Mr. Kearns didn't say hello. He had a small notebook open on his knee, and he was looking at my hands.
Mom lifted a blue duffel bag from beside the garage door.
"I packed for you already, so you don't have to think about a thing," she said. "Toothbrush, pajamas, your birth certificate."
I unzipped the bag. The birth certificate lay folded flat on top of the pajamas.
"Why does a rest home need my birth certificate?" I asked.
"They need proof of who you are, sweetheart. It's only paperwork."
She took my hand to calm me, and she let go almost at once.
She never held on for long. Mom had always said my hands ran too warm.
Chelsea's phone was still up. Forty people were waiting to see me cry and sign.
I thought about the three years of Sunday dinners.
I thought about every one of those faces nodding while Troy read out what I had spent.
Not one person at that party asked me what was in the silos.
So I picked my keys up off the table and walked out.
"Robin, wait," Troy called. "If you leave now, I can't protect you."
"We only want you safe," Mom said, crying openly now, and Chelsea's phone swung to follow me across the lawn.
I didn't turn around.
At the gate I looked back once.
Mr. Kearns hadn't stood up. He wrote something in his notebook, and he watched me go.
I got into my truck and shut the door.
My phone buzzed with a message from the camera at my front gate.
Motion detected.
The clip showed a tow truck with LOWRY TOWING on the door, and a man in a hooded jacket standing at my chain with bolt cutters.
Under the clip, a text from Troy had just come in.
"My brothers are only measuring the gate. The buyer wants the place by Monday. Please don't make a scene."
He had typed it while he stood on my mother's lawn and begged me to stay.
He already had a buyer.
I started the engine.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend