Bette placed her keys in the ignition with trembling fingers. She placed both hands on the steering wheel and took a deep breath. This was ridiculous. She needed to calm down; it wasn’t as if Candace was about to come charging out of her house with her robe flying open, brandishing a butcher knife. She was safe now, and it was all over.

Bette gritted her teeth and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. “Well, you fucked that one up royally,” she muttered to herself.

But what did it matter? If she had really cared about Candace, she would be feeling a lot guiltier or a lot more concerned about how Candace must be feeling now. But she didn’t feel anything. The same emptiness that had triggered this morning’s drama enveloped her again.

You’re a real piece of work, you know that? She thought to herself. You’re a horrible person. You don’t give a damn about Candace.

“No, I don’t,” she said aloud, half wonderingly. Do I care about anyone anymore?

Sighing, she turned the ignition and carefully backed out of the driveway. For now, getting away from Candace permanently was all she needed. She would figure the rest out later.

She drove home quickly, breaking the speed limit several times and going unnoticed. She called James on the way and warned him to cancel her 9:45 and told him she would be there at ten, something had come up.

She parked and ran up the pathway to the house, hurriedly unlocking then banging the door closed. She went to a closet, hunting for a box. After finding a largish one, she carried it under one arm, moving quickly, purposefully through the house, shoving what meager traces of Candace she could find into the box. There was a plaid shirt Bette had borrowed to wear home once when her own blouse had been ripped open and ruined, the buttons flying away from the material like something out of a cheap romance novel. There were little things, with much less exciting memories attached to them: a book she had borrowed from Candace and had never found the time to read, a wooden barrette that had somehow found its way into one of Bette’s suit jackets, and other foreign debris that Bette carelessly dropped into the box.