Free The Status of All Things by Liz Fenton, Lisa Steinke

told me he couldn’t marry me, the shame I felt as we broke the news, theanguish that stirred inside of me when I came home to an empty condo. The sound of his voice cracking when he told me he’d fallen in love with my friend Courtney. “It really was. You have no idea!”
    “I’ve never seen you like that. You sounded so—” Max rests a bag of Sumatra beans on the counter.
    “Crazy?” I offer.
    “I was going to say psycho.” Max turns and a smile plays on his lips and I feel the knots in my shoulders loosen. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    I look at him now, taking in his wavy hair that always sticks up at the cowlick when he wakes up in the morning, the way his right dimple appears just when you’ve forgotten about it, the slightly chipped tooth from a childhood hockey game that he refused to have fixed because he thought it gave him character, and decide to keep the details of the nightmare to myself. Knowing Max, it would only make him feel bad to hear that he’d been such an asshole, even if he’d only done it in my dreams. That’s the kind of guy he was.
    “I’m so sorry for jumping all over you like that—you didn’t do anything wrong. It felt so real —I’ve never had a nightmare like that before. I just need to shake it off and I’ll be fine,” I say definitively, even though I’m still able to recall every nuance, every pain, every single last moment. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget any of it.
    “You sure?”
    I nod.
    “Okay, why don’t you go up and take a shower?” Max suggests. “And I’ll make you some of this ,” he says, pointing to the bag of coffee. “Extra, extra bold, just the way you like it.”
    “Thank you,” I say, leaning my head against his shoulder andwrapping my arms tightly around his body, not wanting to let go.
    Max hadn’t left me. Thank God.
    As I head up the stairs, I still feel the bad dream pushing on my chest—a small burn reminding me how devastated I’d felt only minutes before. I scrub my body hard in the shower, trying to wash away the emotional residue the nightmare has left on me, but it refuses to disappear, like one of those hand stamps you get at a theme park. Giving up, I finally push open the glass door, the steam enveloping me as I wrap my robe snugly around my body. I rub the foggy mirror in a circular motion so I can see myself, and as I take in my wet, stringy hair, I wish I had gotten that blowout yesterday. I absolutely despise blow-drying my hair—so much that Jules and I have a pact: if either of us wins the lottery, we will hire the other a full-time stylist.
    I slide my laptop out of my computer bag and perch on the edge of the bed, pulling up my Facebook page, the photo I’d posted where I was mischievously sticking my head out from behind the dressing room curtain when I was at the boutique for my final wedding dress fitting filling the screen. I close my eyes for a moment, calmed by the memory of the feel of the organza gown hugging my body as I twirled in front of the three-way mirror, tears springing to my mom’s eyes as she’d watched.
    This wedding is still happening.
    Then Courtney’s face appears in my feed, and I click on a picture she’d taken after her appointment at Drybar—the one that I hadn’t joined her for. A shiver runs through me as I study her chestnut-colored eyes. I know now that she hadn’t really stolen my fiancé, but for some reason I still felt inexplicably angry with her, a raw rage that I’d never experienced before—one so intense it compelled me to want to find her and pluck every last silky hair out of her scalp.
    I click back over to my own page, desperate to get away from Courtney’s perma-grin, her row of perfectly even beauty pageant teeth making my stomach hurt. For a split second, I consider grabbing my phone and pointing it at the bathroom mirror, capturing my hair as it looks in this moment, soggy and limp, half straight, half wavy, framing my face and making me look like a