People We Meet on Vacation - Emily Henry Page 0,70

they were also amazing and kind and funny, and I hated myself for even considering being embarrassed by them.

Gui would love them, I told myself. Gui loved me, and these were the people who’d made me.

At the end of our first night there, we shut ourselves into my childhood bedroom and he said, “I think I understand you better now than ever before.”

His voice was as tender and warm as ever, but instead of love, it sounded like sympathy.

“I get why you had to flee to New York,” he said. “It must’ve been so hard for you here.”

My stomach sunk and my heart squeezed painfully, but I didn’t correct him. Again, I just hated myself for being embarrassed.

Because I had fled to New York, but I hadn’t fled my family, and if I’d kept them separate from the rest of my life, it was only to protect them from judgment, and myself from this familiar feeling of rejection.

The rest of the trip was uncomfortable. Gui was kind to my family—he was always kind—but I saw every interaction they had through a lens of condescension and pity after that.

I tried to forget the trip had happened. We were happy together, in our real life, in New York. So what if he didn’t understand my family? He loved me.

A few weeks later, we went to a dinner party at his friend’s brownstone, someone he’d known from boarding school, a guy with a trust fund and a Damien Hirst painting hanging over the dining room table. I knew this—would never forget it—because when someone said the name, unrelated to the painting, I said, “Who?” and laughter followed.

They weren’t laughing at me; they genuinely thought I was making a joke.

Four days after that, Guillermo ended our relationship. “We’re just too different,” he said. “We got swept up in our chemistry, but long term, we want different things.”

I’m not saying he dumped me for not knowing who Damien Hirst was. But I’m not not saying that either.

When I moved out of the apartment, I stole one of his fancy cooking knives.

I could’ve taken them all, but my mild form of revenge was imagining him looking everywhere for it, trying to figure out if he took it with him to a dinner party or it fell into the gap between his enormous refrigerator and the kitchen island.

Frankly, I wanted the knife to haunt him.

Not in a My-Ex-Is-Going-to-Go-All-Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction way, but in a Something-About-This-Missing-Knife-Seems-to-Be-Conjuring-a-Strong-Metaphor-and-I-Can’t-Figure-Out-What-It’s-Saying way.

I started feeling guilty after a week in my new apartment—once the sobbing wore off—and considered mailing the knife back but thought that might send the wrong message. I imagined Gui showing up to the police department with the package, and decided I’d just let him buy a new knife.

I thought about selling the stolen one online, and worried the anonymous buyer would turn out to be him, so I just kept it and resumed my sobbing until I was done threeish weeks later.

The point is, breakups suck. Breakups between cohabitating partners in overpriced cities suck a little extra, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to afford a summer trip this year.

And then there was the matter of Sarah Torval.

Adorable, willowy yet athletic, clean-faced, brown-eyeliner-wearing Sarah Torval.

Who Alex has been seriously dating for nine months. After their first chance encounter when Alex was visiting friends in Chicago, their texting had quickly evolved into phone calls, and then another visit. After that they’d gotten serious fast, and after six months long distance, she’d taken a teaching job and moved to Indiana to be with him while he finished his MFA. She’s happy to stay there while he works toward his doctorate, and will probably follow him wherever he lands afterward.

Which would make me happy if not for my increasing suspicion that she hates me.

Whenever she posts pictures of herself holding Alex’s brand-new baby niece with captions like family time, or this little love bug, I like the post and comment, but she refuses to follow me back. I even unfollowed and refollowed her once, in case she hadn’t noticed me the first time.

“I think she feels kind of weird about the trip,” Alex admits on one of our (now fewer and farther between) calls. I’m pretty sure he only calls me from the car, when he’s on his way to or from the gym. I want to tell him that calling me only when she’s not around probably isn’t helping.

But the truth is, I don’t want to talk to him while anyone else is