Cross My Heart

by Megan Collins

There are two pets in this book—a dog and a cat—who never come to any harm. I can’t, however, promise the same for the humans.

It was a fox some driver had left for dead, its fur torn open by tires. Still, she stooped over the animal, checking for movement, for breath, before finally accepting she was too late to save it. In

“Can you think of anyone who might try to appropriate your identity?”

“The barista remembers informing Mr. Thorne and his companion that the café was closing, which corroborates a detail from his email. But she said that the pink-haired woman at the table with Mr. Thorne was not you. That, in fact, you had left hours earlier.” I shake my head, the information like a riddle. “I— So. What are you saying? You think someone followed me to Sweet Bean and—pretended to be me?”

“Brad and I had a relationship.” She jolts from the lash of it. “Yes,” she says after a moment. “But you know what I mean. The relationship wasn’t… what you thought. For god’s sake, you rushed out to buy that wedding dress and—”

“Rosie,” she says, and I feel it coming: another thing I remember too well. “That poor man never even proposed to you.”

“I could sit like this forever. Just you and me.” I held my breath, expecting him to walk the comment back, like all my boyfriends had before, any time they stumbled into discussions of the future, any time they sounded more serious about me than they’d intended. But Brad doubled down. “Couldn’t you?” he asked when I didn’t answer. And then, in a moment of vulnerability, he added, “Don’t you want that for us? To be together forever?” I kissed him sweeter, then deeper, than I ever had, and when our lips separated, I answered: “Yes.”

After that, I started leaving my things at his apartment, instead of relying on an overnight bag. A toothbrush in his medicine cabinet. Face wash beneath the sink. A loofah in the shower. Change of clothes in his bottom drawer. Every time he noticed another item, he looked, if only for a second, like the men I’d loved before: cornered and concerned. But he never said anything, never told me I’d gotten the wrong idea, that my stuff, my life, wasn’t welcome beside his.