I was scared shitless when I first woke up with my cheek against the kitchen table. My neck hurt from the way I'd slept, hanging halfway off the table. As I cracked my neck and circled it around, my dreams came back to me: Austin and I at the edge of the stairs, my mom making lasagna with us as she danced around the kitchen to Alanis Morrisette . . . and then another dream about a crying girl with blood as tears. It had to be a metaphor for something, but I didn't have the capacity to analyze it right now.

At four in the morning, I had woken up with a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread next to my head, and closed the twist tie on the bag before dragging myself to my bedroom and flopping straight onto my bed without taking off my work clothes.

When I finally got out of bed, it took a long shower to make me feel somewhat human. Walking down the hall into the kitchen, I popped a coffee pod into my old Keurig and waited for my lifeblood to pour into the mug. Outside the window, the sun was still hiding, and the sky was still crying as I sipped my coffee and picked at the stale bread still on a plate from last night.

Elodie appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. "I'll be back soon. Just grabbing some things from the store," she told me, hugging the back of my shoulders. She smelled like fruit and linen.

"You sleep well?" I asked, looking at her frail face. She was pink and glowing, but her eyes were puffy. She needed to rest.

"Kare, I'm sorry if you heard us arguing last night," she said, standing in front of me, her blond bob swaying a little. I looked into her big blue-and-bloodshot eyes and she bit down on her lip. "Phillip's just . . . he's stressed because he's not here. So, we're kind of fighting a lot. But he's fine. Everything's fine," she assured me, her hands fidgeting in front of her body.

I absolutely didn't believe her for one second, but I wanted her to feel comfortable and talk to me when she decided she wanted to.

"I didn't hear anything." I shrugged. "I slept at the kitchen table, though." I laughed a little to drown out the sound of the crying girl from my dream last night.

Elodie smiled, relief filling her adorable face.

"Okay. I'll be back in a little while. I have to work, too." She double-kissed my cheeks and rushed out the back door.

"Bye!" I yelled to her as the screen door snapped back after her exit.

I hated knowing they were fighting, and I hoped like hell it would get worked out for her sake, but if it didn't, I would be here for her and the baby in every way I could.

According to Elodie, she'd watched a YouTube video that told her the calmer she was during the pregnancy and the calmer the environment her baby was born into, the more calm the baby would be, so I was going to do my best to help make that happen.

I put a load of my laundry in the wash and went back into my bedroom. It looked so different with my mattress bare, so much bigger without the pillows across the top of my bed. I moved the junk on the top of my dresser around. I swiped my finger across the surface, through the gray dust, and scribbled a K and a heart, but caught myself and scribbled it out. I had always been an inveterate doodler, all the way back to my middle school agenda book. Dust collected so fast in my little house, I could never really keep up with it. That, or the succulent on my dresser. It was dead now.

Jesus, I couldn't even keep a cactus alive.

I sat down on my bed and pulled my phone from my pajama shorts pocket. I never got any calls, but I still checked my phone constantly. I wiped the screen off on my pajamas and set it on my dresser while I chose my clothes for the day. The humidity from the morning rain seeped in through the cracks around my windows and my room was like a sauna; it was miserable. I was nearly soaked by the time I finished getting dressed. I turned on the air conditioner in the corner, then turned it right back off, knowing my bills were high enough as it was. I needed to get out of my room before I spent the morning unnecessarily redecorating.

Dishes. I could wash dishes. I had to be at work in half an hour and was already dressed in my uniform, anyway. I went with an all-black, funereal pair of scrubs. I had time to kill, and I knew Elodie would do them if I didn't—and why should she have to be the one to scrape off the pan from the other night's failed attempt at a lasagna?

I turned on the water as her name popped up on my phone screen on the counter.

Do you want coffee? I'm almost back home

I looked at the empty mug and replied. The more caffeine I could have, the better the day would be. Around noon I'd get jittery, but that was just part of my routine these days.

I thought about inviting Elodie to spend uninterrupted time with me tonight after we got off work. That would be my chance to confess everything that had happened, everything I'd been hiding from her. I could make a reservation at the only restaurant in town that actually took reservations. I knew she loved their steak. It would be good for us to hang out outside the house for once. It would also be good for her to know that I was actively trying to spend time with her, and not just occupy the same space, sitting on the couch while we both tried to stay awake with our phones in our hands. So far, I was able to get away with telling her that I ended things with Kael because he's being discharged soon, and I didn't want to get wrapped up into that. She knew my stance on being with a soldier, so I thought I had convinced her, but the more times she asked, I saw the doubt grow in her eyes when I told her half-truths. Elodie was great at not prying and she knew me well enough to know that pushing me to talk about what I wasn't ready to discuss wouldn't help our friendship in the long run.

Maya Angelou taught Oprah, who taught me, that when people show you who they are, you should believe them the first time. People are often less much complicated than they want us to believe—they seem predictable—but when they show their true colors, that's who they really are. I tried to give the Army wives the benefit of the doubt that their budding friendship with Elodie was honest and genuine, despite the prejudgment engraved into my brain. I hadn't really met them, but I knew how cliques of young Army wives could be. They could be sugar or salt. I was suspicious that this group of women wasn't the kindest to Elodie before, making her feel like an outcast at first, and then suddenly she was a part of their clique. I remembered the way my mom was treated like an outcast, and how that rejection made her rebel against her idea of the typical way an officer's wife was supposed to behave—the way my dad wanted her to be as the homemaker and bearer of his last name. My mom was never one to follow the crowd, but the pressure cooked her until she exploded.

Even Estelle, my dad's borderline Stepford wife, was at times the target of childish gossip, despite my dad being high up on the totem pole here at Fort Benning. They lived in the biggest model of house the post offered, and my dad bought her the nicest purses, tax-free, from the PX. She went above and beyond for acceptance from the women, from their bake sales and group trips to Savannah when tax season came. Still, no matter what she did, some of the wives still gossiped. They would say my dad's "crazy," "trashy" first wife took off and never came back. Some of the other wives had actually liked my mom and they would whisper that Estelle was probably having an affair with our dad before my mom left. Austin got in a lot of arguments, sometimes even fights with kids our age, over our mom and the mystery of her disappearance.

Elodie and my mom were completely different people, and maybe times had changed, but given the rhetoric I had grown up hearing, it was hard to release my judgment. Elodie felt like such an easy target for mean girls. So that didn't help. Her kindness and grace came so effortlessly and her sweet accent that always made everything sound much softer made her an outsider, in a way. One of them also recently accused her of hitting on their husband, whom Elodie had only double-cheek-kissed out of innocent habit. They turned on her quickly and had even made a post on Facebook talking about her in detail, but for some reason, they didn't say her name. It seemed they had all moved on since Elodie was hanging out with them again.

But poor Elodie, she was getting it from all sides; Phillip was calling more often from Afghanistan and their disagreements grew by the day, it seemed. She hadn't been sleeping much compared to the previous weeks when it seemed like that was all she did. She was so tired lately that by the time she got home from so-and-so's house, or from a Family Readiness Group meeting, she turned on Netflix and passed out on the couch less than halfway through an episode, but then she would be wide awake and on the phone at three in the morning. She continued to sleep on the couch, saying it was less lonely than a bed; she slept holding on to a body pillow and I started to wonder if I would be less lonely if I tried one, too.

I had a new philosophy of late: every single hour of sleep meant less time awake to face my shit show of a life. Less of a chance of confronting my brother. More time in my bed also meant less of a chance of running into Kael. Less of a chance of dealing with anything that I didn't want to deal with. By the time I got off work, and finished pulling the weeds that were taking over my yard, or cleaned the house, or even just stared at the crack in the kitchen ceiling, it was almost time to wake up and repeat it all over again. The problem was that all of those mind-numbing tasks actually had the opposite effect on me: my mind was anything but numb. My thoughts constantly churned and spun as I tried to make sense of everything that had gone down.

Prior to Kael, Brien was my only point of reference as an ex, and our breakups never bothered me this way. I was always the less emotional one, the one who didn't cry and didn't budge when I thought I was right. He was the apologizer . . . at least in the beginning.

Over the course of our relationship, he wore me down, and now, with him completely out of my life, I knew that our relationship had felt so big to me because it was the closest I had ever been with a man. In his case, a boy pretending to be a man, but most men that I'd met seemed to be in that class. But you know, daddy issues and all that. Given the man who raised me, it was only natural for me to attract men who weren't good for me.

Not Kael, though. Kael was an exception to nearly every rule. Every preconceived notion I had about men and relationships, he had proved them wrong.

Until he didn't.

What he did was reinforce that I should never trust people I barely knew. Well, trusting anyone was risky, since I couldn't trust Austin, my dad, or even myself lately.

I couldn't think about Austin, and how he was throwing his life away and was a coward for avoiding me. Or Kael, and how he was helping him do just that. Ugh, my mind was all over the place, making my heart race to try to keep up. It felt completely devastating at first, calling my brother at least twenty times, texting him long rants about my anger and even apologies about the rants. It became a cycle. I avoided my dad's stupid dinners the way Austin avoided me. I was growing tired of being the only person in my family who ever held themselves accountable. I was clearly still angry at Austin for not even trying to talk to me about it, or apologizing. The whole situation was completely unresolved and it made me sick thinking about it. Maybe it was time to cut him out of my life?

I couldn't decide today, but this total blackout of communication was driving me mad and I needed to keep my head as clear as possible by reminding myself daily that I couldn't change anything about this. I couldn't undo his contract with the Army, and I couldn't make him take accountability and have a conversation with me. I didn't even know exactly where Kael's house was, so I couldn't just show up there to force Austin to explain himself to me. I mentally had to come to terms with the fact that Austin was actively choosing himself over my feelings about his choices and that he didn't care about hurting me the way that I thought he did.

Water splashed on my feet, and I looked down to see it leaking over the edge of the kitchen sink, soaking my only pair of work shoes. I barely remembered turning the water on.

What the hell was wrong with me?

Quickly, I yanked the spout to shut the water off and let some of it drain while I grabbed a towel and threw it onto the floor, using my feet to dry the spillage. I added a ton of purple lavender dish soap to drown out the scent of the rest of the dishes. The pan from the other night was so blackened that I could still smell the burnt cheese. That, mixed with the humidity outside, did not create a good aroma in such an old house.

My fingers moved across a smooth ceramic plate. In the soapy water, I could feel the inscription of the date that Estelle and my dad promised to love one another until death did them part.

I was surprised that the fragile wedding gift had lasted so long in my chaotic little house.