WHEN ALEX GOT HOME, the first thing he did was to Google music festivals in Venice Beach, Florida, over the past summer. He found one that fit the bill, then started going through the featured bands one by one until he found one with a front man named Evan.
He knew instantly that he’d found the right Evan. He knew it by the breezy confidence, the pretty-boy face. The skinny jeans. The man bun.
Evan. What a punk name. Alex had never known anyone named Evan before, never thought about the name one way or another. Now he hated it.
It didn’t take long to find confirmation in the form of another picture of Evan, this time with his arm around Lauren.
She had her hair twisted up high on her head, with lots of loose tendrils curling around her face and neck. A hint of sunburn glowed on her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. The straps of an emerald-green swimsuit showed around the wide, off-the-shoulder neckline of a thin, see-through T-shirt. She was holding on to Evan and looking straight at the camera with an open, happy, beautiful smile.
The sight hit Alex like a gut punch. He actually couldn’t breathe for a moment, and he felt like he might throw up. All that love and trust and joy, and Evan had treated her like last week’s trash.
He went through all the band’s pictures from the festival, then googled the band and found its official site. Plenty more pictures here, from before and after Lauren, of Evan looking infuriating in a dozen other cities, always with a beautiful woman or two at his side.
Why on earth had he married her to begin with? What had he been thinking? Why go to the trouble of marriage if you didn’t mean it, if you weren’t ready to follow through? Maybe he knew Lauren wouldn’t go for a casual hookup, so he tailored his approach. And maybe he got drawn in by the challenge of the thing.
Come to think of it, for someone who had so little regard for marriage to begin with, there wasn’t any reason not to marry her.
It was even possible that on some level, he thought he wanted to do it. Maybe he’d convinced himself with all his emotional talk. People like that were just as capable of fooling themselves as they were of fooling other people. But they didn’t have the substance to back up their promises.
He went back to the picture of Evan and Lauren together. Lauren was tagged in it, and Alex saw a hashtag for Vincent Van-Go. He clicked the link.
It took him to Lauren’s Instagram. The pics at the top of the feed, the most recent ones, were of Enchanted Rock. He worked his way down to a shot of a night sky, all purple and blue, slashed with white lines in different directions—the Perseids meteor shower, captured with some kind of fancy camera with time-lapse capabilities. Evan would have been with her then; that was their stolen weekend of lovemaking and stargazing, when he’d made his brief return. Alex imagined Lauren lying on her back on a blanket on the ground, with Evan beside her. Had she suspected how fragile her happiness was?
He skipped the next few pics, all nature shots, and clicked on a thumbnail of a view through the open back doors of the van, with two sets of legs stretched out side by side, crossed at the ankles—one set obviously hers, the other just as obviously Evan’s—and the rolling surf beyond. There was a time gap of a few weeks between that one and the Perseids one, filled by the nature shots.
Before the legs pic came a shot of Evan, shirtless, lying on Lauren’s bed in the van, with a coffee mug resting on his abs, facing the camera with a daydreamy smile on his face, like he was gazing at the most important and fascinating thing in the world. Alex wanted to punch him in the mouth.
More pics of Evan, and the beach, and the band. Selfies of Lauren and Evan together.
The wedding.
Alex shut his eyes, forced himself to take some slow, deep breaths. His heart was pounding with hot rage. He felt genuine physical distress, like an actual fight-or-flight response.
He opened his eyes and looked at every last picture of the wedding. It was all there, just like Lauren said. The bare feet, the sandcastle. Lauren in her wedding dress.
The pic just before the wedding was a shot of Evan wading in the surf. The caption said something about “this amazing man just asked me to marry him,” followed by a bunch of hashtags.
Until now he hadn’t been looking at the captions, just the images. Now he went through a second time and read the words. All the Evan-related captions, from the beginning of the romance to what had to be the last one before he left, had a kind of giddy vibe—Evan this and Evan that, how blessed she was to have this wonderful man and blah, blah, blah. The post-Evan ones, between his leaving and the Perseids, didn’t mention him at all. No doubt she’d felt too bruised then to deal with explaining his absence on a public forum, and was still holding out hope that he’d come back. He’d come back, all right, the jerk—just long enough to get laid.
Alex went back further, to what must have been Lauren and Evan’s first meeting. It was the same pic he’d seen on the band’s site.
He went back further still, to places Lauren had stayed in the van earlier in the year. It looked like she’d spent a few months on the southeast coast. Georgia. Some beaches in South and North Carolina—Little River, Myrtle Beach, the Outer Banks. Assateague Island, with wild ponies. She’d wintered there.
Then suddenly, she was in Oregon, at a place called the Willamette Valley, working as a harvest hand at a winery in the fall, and at a berry farm before that. The pictures were truly breathtaking—berry bushes thick and heavy with ripe fruit, grape clusters hanging beneath leaves in vivid fall colors, red and green and gold. Moody shots of rain falling outside the van windows.
On and on he went, back in time through Lauren’s travels. Big Sur in California. The ranch in Mexico. Everything started getting jumbled in Alex’s mind—pictures of landscapes, close-ups of plants, leaves, moss, animals, people. The occasional selfie.
Then suddenly he was looking at a picture of himself, wearing a plaid shirt and vest and a boutonniere made of sunflower and Texas sage. He’d reached Tony and Dalia’s wedding.
He’d never bothered to check out the wedding pics before; he’d been there, he didn’t need to see pictures of it. Now he was amazed by how excellent a job Lauren had done. She’d captured not just the images, but the whole spirit of the event, and Tony and Dalia’s personalities. She was good, really good.
There he was, dancing with his cousin Annalisa. And there he was alone, with a hashtag of “handsome cowboy.” He actually felt himself blush.
Another candid shot of him, and another, and another. He’d never realized she’d taken these. She’d made him look good, too.
The wedding pics ended, and he kept going back. Rapid-riding in Colorado, rock climbing in Utah. Months turned into years. He saw a pic of Lauren about to set out on Vincent Van-Go’s maiden voyage. Then further still, to pics of her fixing up the van, looking amazing in a worn leather tool belt. A man was in some of these, a tall, bearded, fiftyish guy with a friendly, open face, and Alex knew right away it must be Lauren’s dad. He looked like the kind of calm, quiet, easygoing, capable, likable, reliable guy that everyone was happy to have around.
One more shot, of the exterior of the newly purchased van. And that was it. He’d come to the end...actually, the beginning. He’d gone through the whole dang thing, Lauren’s entire Instagram.
His eyes were burning, and his back ached. He looked at the clock. Had he really wasted that much time on the internet? It didn’t seem possible, but in a way it felt like he’d been gone a lot longer.
He got up, stretched, yawned, blinked. Compared to Lauren’s van, his apartment looked cramped and dingy and pathetic. ’Course, those Instagram shots were all carefully staged and curated and whatnot, but still. His place wasn’t even close to Instagram-able. It was barely livable.
Admittedly, he didn’t have much to work with. An efficiency apartment. Micro kitchen, bar for eating, twin bed, narrow closet with accordion-style doors. Dirty laundry all over the floor.
Okay, maybe the dirty laundry wasn’t an actual feature of the apartment, or the dirty dishes all over the counters. But the mess was a natural result of living in a small cheap place while working two jobs and maintaining a ranch and keeping up with a complex legal tangle. Better to save his money, and use his time and energy to work and earn more, and let the discomfort of his living conditions drive him to work harder.
At least, that’s what he’d been telling himself. But in all honesty, it wasn’t like having a dirty kitchen was helping him achieve his goals. If anything, it held him back, wasted his time by forcing him to scrounge for clean dishes, or wash a few at a time.
He cleaned the kitchen. Changed the sheets, made the bed. Picked up his laundry, sorted it, started three loads in the apartment complex’s laundry room.
A paneled cupboard—Spanish, seventeenth century—stood in the corner. One door was completely off the hinges, and the bottom drawer was in pieces. He’d gotten the piece at Architectural Treasures—gotten it for a song, because it needed work, work he could do. He could see it in his mind, tenderly restored, standing in the dining room of his grandparents’ house, once the house belonged to him.
But it had been sitting there in ruins for months now, ever since he’d brought it home. He’d told himself there was no hurry; it wasn’t like he was very close to moving to the ranch. Just like there was no point in paying for a nicer apartment now, or exerting much effort in making it look good.
The dovetail joints of the large drawer needed repair, and the drawer and cabinet pulls were all loose, but the wood was sound. Not much more to it than some wood glue and band clamps, wood filler and new screws. No need to refinish; the old patina was gorgeous just the way it was.
He went to work. And while he worked, he thought of Lauren. He was coming to understand her better, had been ever since the reenactment festival. That whole in-the-moment thing wasn’t just an excuse for a short attention span. It was the opposite. She focused her attention on what was right before her, appreciated it, experienced it to the full. It was kind of beautiful. He understood the appeal of van life better now, too. He still wouldn’t want to do it, but he got it, a little.
And another thing. He had just spent an embarrassing amount of time online. Why had he gotten so drawn in? Because he was mad in an impersonal way that a woman had been so mistreated? No. That didn’t explain three hours online stalking—yes, stalking—a woman and her ex, or the roller coaster of emotions he’d experienced with the different pictures. Everything from dizzy pleasure to deep-down rage that felt an awful lot like jealousy. Or how he’d kept going back chronologically, hungry to get more of her, even on an electronic level—to understand her, to know her.
All of which raised some disturbing questions. Was he actually falling for her? And if so, what was he going to do about it?