Fourteen hours gives you a lot of time to rationalize.

The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Culler is not a fuck-and-run type guy. We didn’t even have sex. He just took my picture. So maybe something happened, like a family emergency. The kind that’s so bad, there’s no time to tell anyone about it. You just have to get up and go and hope that the people you ditched will forgive you after you explain to them that it was a matter of life and death. That kind of thing.

I search the motel again, for a note, just in case. I check behind the bed where I find—ugh, an old, used condom. I search under the pillows and the mattress, feeling stupider by the second. The nightstand. I find a Bible there, like those motels in the movies, or maybe that’s how motels really are. I check the chairs, behind the TV.

There’s nothing.

I bury my face in my hands and think. Just think. This is not right. There is a reason he would do this to me.

Maybe—maybe …

Maybe he was scared of what we’d find at the church. My heart jolts at this—finally, an answer that seems feasible. Maybe it all got to be too much for him. I’d understand that.

It has to be something like that.

But I wish he’d told me he felt that way, because I’d forgive him that.

If he told me that, I’d forgive him.