A stray shower stops by the time I pull onto the highway, but the road still glistens under my headlights, a long black ribbon unwinding toward Atlanta. I keep both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way my mother taught me. I try not to think about how long it has been since I drove farther than the grocery store. The GPS says forty-seven minutes which it felt that long just to access the highway.
The red dress pulls across my shoulders when I swap lanes. It belonged to my mother. I found it this afternoon hanging in the back of her closet, still wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic from a shop just a skip from the house. She never wore it. I remember her buying it on sale for her high school reunion, but she got sick and never made it. Now the fabric smells faintly of the lavender sachets she kept that makes me teary if I dwell on it. The dress fits me well enough, though the hem falls a little lower on me than it would have on her, and the ruby stud in my nose catches the dashboard light that perfectly matches the dress hue.
Mitzy has texted me four times since I left the house. U better be in the car, the first one said. Then I mean it Sunny. Then a string of party hat emojis. Then He’s here and he looks GOOD. I read the last one at a red light and feel something shift in my chest, a quick flutter that I try to ignore by adjusting the climate control. The air in the car is too warm. I crack the window and let the cool night air graze across my lightly blushed face.
Atlanta rises up from the dark like a city in a photograph, all lit windows and streaming taillights. I follow the GPS through streets I do not recognize, past restaurants with valet stands and buildings with doormen, until the voice tells me I have arrived at my destination. But the parking garage off Lenox Parkway is not what I expected. A metal arm blocks the entrance, and the ticket machine glows red instead of green. I press the button anyway, roll down my window, and wave my phone at the scanner the way I have seen other people do. Nothing happens.
“We are full,” a voice says.
A security guard appears at my window, a man in a navy uniform with a patch on his shoulder that reads Ready One Security. He has a thin mustache and the kind of posture that suggests he has been standing in this same spot for hours. I hold up my phone with the QR code and the booking confirmation.
He leans in and studies the screen, then shakes his head. “This is the building garage. You booked the overflow lot. It’s another block down, left out of here at the light, then the first right. You’ll see the sign.”
I look at my phone again. The booking does not say overflow. It says half a block from the venue, and I remember choosing it because it was cheaper and because the idea of navigating a crowded parking structure made my palms sweat. But I do not argue. The guard is already stepping back, already turning his attention to a delivery van that has pulled up behind me. He allows me to do a U turn to put me back onto Lenox Parkway. I follow his directions and reach the overflow garage.
The overflow garage is darker than the first one, a concrete box with flickering fluorescent lights and a gate that opens after I scan my phone twice. There are almost no cars inside. I wind up the ramp, level after level, past empty spaces marked with yellow lines and oil stains, past a sign for the third floor that has come loose from its bracket and hangs at an angle. By the time I reach the ninth level, I have not seen another vehicle in four floors. I have no idea why they reserved my space on the upper level when there are clearly many other appealing spots available. Normally, you can just park where you want, but maybe there is an event going on, maybe it will be booked solid soon. I try to calm my thoughts and not to obsess over things that are trivial.
My spot is in the far corner, near a stairwell door with a broken light above it. I pull in, cut the engine and sit for a moment with my hands still on the wheel. The only other vehicle on this level is a van parked a few spaces down, a dark shape in the shadows where the overhead lights have burned out. I cannot tell what color it is. I cannot tell if anyone is inside it. I tell myself it is a delivery van, a maintenance vehicle, something that belongs. I tell myself that parking garages always feel this way at night, empty and too quiet, and that I have been inside my house for too long and have forgotten what the world feels like.
I get out of the car, lock it and walk toward the stairwell. My heels I just bought click on the concrete, killing my feet and the sound echoes up into the dark. I do not look back at the van.
The Skyline Club sits on the top floor of the Hyatt Hotel Centric, a rooftop venue with floor-to-ceiling windows and a copper counter bar that glows blue under recessed lighting. I step out of the elevator and into a room full of strangers; men in high end suits and women in designer cocktail dresses, all of them mingling and laughing at things that are probably not funny. A banner near the windows reads HAPPY 30TH ETHAN in gold letters, and beneath it a table holds a tower of gold dusted cupcakes and a stack of gift bags tied with ribbon. I feel really low, I forgot the most basic thing, to buy and bring Ethan a birthday gift.
“Sunny!” Mitzy’s voice cuts through the noise before I see her. She appears from the crowd in a glamorous blue halter top and slacks so tight they look painted on, her long black hair bouncy and her fake eyelashes sparkling in silver. She throws her arms around me and squeezes hard enough that my head could pop off. “Oh, my goodness you came. You actually came. And look at you, that dress is fire. It’s gorgeous. Okay, come on, Ethan’s over by the bar, I told him you were coming and he got this big smile on his face, like the whole thing, you know the one...”
She is still talking, but I have stopped listening. Because I see him. Ethan stands near the bar with a glass in his hand, tall and brown-haired and smiling that practiced smile Mitzy described, the one that shows his perfect teeth. He wears a dark blazer over a white shirt with no tie, and he looks exactly like the photograph I have looked at a hundred times, the one from the barbecue, the one I scrolled to last night while the rain fell outside my window.
And then I see her.
Carly. My former boss. The woman who fired me from my first job out of college, who called me into her office on a Tuesday afternoon and told me I was not a good fit while she ate lunch and did not look at my face. She stands beside Ethan now with her hand on his arm, and as I watch, frozen in the middle of the room with Mitzy still chattering in my ear, Ethan turns to her. He cups her face in his hands. He kisses her.
Not a quick kiss. Not a friendly kiss. A long kiss, the kind that says I have been waiting to do this, the kind that makes the people around them squeamish.
Mitzy stops talking. I feel her hand on my arm, feel her follow my gaze, hear her suck in a breath. “Oh, Sunny. Oh, no. I didn’t... Daniel didn’t tell me she was coming. I swear I didn’t know.”
I do not answer. I turn around and walk toward the elevator.
“Sunny, wait,” Mitzy calls, but I am already pressing the button, already stepping inside, already watching the doors slide shut on her face. The elevator hums and descends, and I stare at my reflection in the polished metal doors. The red dress looks like a dumpster fire now, too not me, too I told you so. I should have worn bunny slippers. I should have stayed home.
The lobby is quiet when I step out. I walk fast through the revolving door and onto the street, and the cold air hits my face and makes my eyes water, or maybe my eyes were already there, I cannot tell. I do not run, but I walk quickly, my heels clicking on the pavement, my breath coming in short bursts that fog in front of me. The block to the parking garage feels longer than it did before. The street is busier. The storefronts bustling.
The stairwell door is still propped open with a brick, the way I left it, and I start climbing. My legs burn by the third floor, and by the sixth I am breathing hard, but I do not stop. I want to be in my car. I want to be on the highway. I want to be home, with the door locked, the fireplace lit and my phone set to do not disturb. Perhaps indulge in a pint. Ice-cream always has its way with me.
The ninth level is darker than I remember. The lights that were flickering when I arrived have gone out entirely, and the only illumination comes from the exit sign above the stairwell door, a red glow that paints the concrete in shades of rust. My car sits where I left it, alone in the corner, and the van is still there too, a few spaces down, still dark, still silent.
I fumble in my purse for my keys. My fingers close around them, and I press the unlock button, and the headlights flash once, a brief reassurance in the dark. I am steps from the driver’s side door when I hear it. A shoe scuffing on concrete. A breath that is not mine.
An arm wraps around my chest and yanks me backward. I open my mouth to scream, but a cloth presses over my nose and mouth before I can make a sound. The smell is sweet and chemical and wrong, and I thrash against the grip, kick my heels against the concrete, try to twist my head away. The arm tightens. The cloth presses harder. My keys fall from my hand and clatter on the ground, and that is the last sound I hear before the world goes soft at the edges and folds in on itself.
Darkness. Not sleep, not quite. A heavy, suffocating dark that presses against my eyelids and fills my mouth with the taste of something bitter. I try to open my eyes and cannot. My lashes are stuck together, gummed with whatever chemical soaked the cloth, and my arms will not move the way I tell them to. I am lying on my side on something cold and hard. Concrete. I can feel the grit of it against my cheek, the chill of it seeping through the red dress.
A voice speaks. Not a human voice. A flat, synthetic voice, the kind that reads text aloud from a screen.
“You should have stayed home.”
The words hang in the dark. I try to answer, try to ask who is there, try to move my lips, but nothing comes out. Somewhere in the distance, a furnace ignites with a low whump, and I feel the vibration of it through the floor, a deep rumble that travels up through the concrete and into my bones. Heat washes over me a moment later, dry and stale, carrying the smell of dust and old metal.
I am in a basement. I do not know how I know this, but I know it the way I know the red dress is still on my body and my mother is still dead and the parking garage is long gone. The furnace cycles on again, a steady hum beneath the silence, and I lie in the dark with my eyes sealed shut and wait for whatever comes next.