She found the app on a Tuesday night.

Not because she was looking for it. Not because she had any particular reason to go through his phone — or that’s what she told herself, anyway. She’d picked it up to change the music. That was the whole story. Just reaching across the couch to skip a song, screen brushing to life in her hand, and there it was.

Plenty of Fish.

Downloaded three days ago.

Jenna stared at that little icon for longer than she should have. The room was quiet. The TV was on but muted, something she’d done an hour ago without thinking about it. Devin was in the shower. She could hear the water running through the wall.

They had been together for one year.

One year, which in your early twenties feels like a decade — like something real and built and permanent, like the kind of relationship that has survived enough bad weeks to mean something. One year of his number at the top of her favorites. One year of inside jokes and his hoodie on her floor and the particular way he laughed at things only she said. One year of being each other’s person.

And three days ago, while all of that was true, he downloaded a dating app.

Here is what Jenna did not do:

She did not throw his phone across the room. She did not go into that bathroom and confront him while the water was still running. She did not call her sister, or her cousin, or her best friend Toya, or anyone at all.

She set the phone down exactly where she found it.

 

 

She changed the song.

And she sat there on that couch with her hands folded in her lap, very still, in the specific way of a person who is thinking very clearly and very quietly about something that has no good answer.

By the time he came out of the shower, towel around his waist, hair damp, smelling like the body wash she bought him — she had already decided what she was going to do.

She was going to catch him herself.

The profile took her forty minutes to make.

She used her friend Scarlet’s pictures. This was the detail she would feel worst about later — not the catfishing, not the deception, not any of the elaborate choreography that came after, but the fact that she looked at her contact list and thought: whose face would make a twenty-three-year-old man stop scrolling?

And she thought of Scarlet.

Scarlet was her girl. Had been since they were kids, back when the world was smaller and the problems were simpler and friendship meant something you didn’t have to explain. They’d been through things together — the kind of things that either break a friendship or weld it permanent. Jenna had shown up for Scarlet in ways that still lived in her body. She had walked to Scarlet’s apartment in negative-five-degree weather, carrying two pints of ice cream, because some guy had wrecked Scarlet’s heart and nobody else was coming.

That was what friends were.

So when she pulled Scarlet’s photos and uploaded them to a fake profile and named the profile something clean and available-sounding — something a man scrolling a dating app at eleven at night would stop and look at twice — she told herself it was temporary. She told herself she’d explain later. She told herself Scarlet would understand.

She named the profile Scarlet.

She kept it simple.

And she sent the first message.

Hey. What’s up.

That was all.

Two words. The most casual possible entry point. She sent them from her new profile to Devin’s account — his real one, with his real photos, the ones she had taken of him at his cousin’s birthday party last summer — and she put her phone face-down on the nightstand and went to brush her teeth.

He replied in six minutes.

She did not let herself feel anything about that yet.

She had a plan. She was going to work the plan.

Not much, he wrote back. You’re beautiful btw.

She stared at the message for a long time.

She wrote back: Thank you 🙂 You’re cute yourself.

And it went from there.

Here is what she learned in the first three days of being Scarlet:

Devin was good at this.

Not good like he’d done it a thousand times, not good like a practiced liar with a system. Good in the more unsettling way — good like it came naturally, like sliding into easy conversation with a stranger was something his personality made room for without even trying.

He was funny. He was attentive. He asked follow-up questions. He remembered details she’d mentioned two conversations ago and circled back to them, which was the specific thing that made her stomach drop every time, because that was what she liked about him in the first place. That was one of the things she had told her sister about him, back in the beginning, when she was first falling. He actually listens.

He was listening to Scarlet too.

By day four, the conversation had moved from the app to texts. His real number, his actual texts, the same thread she would have been in if she were herself.

By day five, he was sending voice memos.

She listened to his voice coming out of her phone’s speaker and she sat in her car in a parking garage and did not cry.

She was past the point of deciding whether this was happening. It was happening. The only question now was how far it was going to go.

She suggested McDonald’s on a Friday afternoon.

This was the test. This was the thing that would tell her everything the text messages hadn’t quite told her yet — or rather, the thing that would make undeniable what the text messages had already made pretty clear.

Hey, she wrote, as Scarlet. I’m going to be near the McDonald’s on Hillcrest tonight. You should come meet me.

She waited.

Twenty-two minutes.

Yeah I can do that. What time?

She put her phone down on the passenger seat.

She sat very still.

Eight o’clock, she wrote back.

Eight o’clock.

She drove to that McDonald’s at seven-thirty and parked down the block, facing the entrance, far enough that she wouldn’t be visible but close enough to see the lot. She sat in her car with the heat off even though it was cold, because turning the heat on felt too comfortable for what she was doing. She sat there and she watched the entrance and she told herself she was ready.

She was not ready.

His car pulled into the lot at 8:04.

She knew that car like she knew his voice. She had sat in that car a hundred times. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat of that car on the way home from his family’s house in the summer, and he had let her sleep and driven the long way around to give her more time. She had eaten fast food in that car, and argued in that car, and said I love you in that car with the windows fogged up and the radio on.

She watched it park.

She watched him get out.

He was dressed up. Not formal — not a special occasion — but he had put in effort. Clean clothes. Fresh haircut he must have gotten that afternoon. He stood in the McDonald’s parking lot and he looked at his phone, probably checking the messages with Scarlet one more time, probably confirming the details, and then he looked up at the entrance.

He walked toward the door.

Jenna put her car in drive.

She didn’t wait to see more. She didn’t need to.

She drove three blocks before she had to pull over because her hands had started shaking. She sat on a side street with the hazard lights on and she put her face in her hands and she breathed.

She was not going to cry in a car on Elm Street at eight in the evening.

She was going to go home.

And in the morning, she was going to figure out what to say.

She called him when she got home.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

His voice was normal. Completely, perfectly normal. She had just watched him drive to a McDonald’s to meet a woman who did not exist, and he answered the phone like a man who had done nothing more interesting than watch TV.

“I know you’re on Plenty of Fish,” she said.

A pause. Short. Controlled.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t.” She sat down on the kitchen floor. She didn’t mean to sit on the floor — it just happened, that slow descent when your legs go a little uncertain under you. “Don’t do that part. I already know.”

“Jenna—”

“I saw the app on your phone.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“I was just talking to people,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“You drove to a McDonald’s, Devin.”

Silence.

“Tonight,” she continued. “Eight o’clock. Hillcrest. You drove there to meet someone named Scarlet.”

The silence this time was different. The quality of it changed. It was the silence of a man recalculating.

“How do you know about that?” he asked.

She closed her eyes.

“Because I’m Scarlet,” she said.

There is a particular kind of argument that starts quiet and gets quieter.

This was that kind.

Devin came over. She didn’t ask him to — he just showed up forty minutes after she hung up the phone, standing on her doorstep in the same outfit he’d worn to the parking lot. She let him in because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands.

“You catfished me,” he said.

“You were on a dating app,” she said.

“So you created a fake profile using your friend’s pictures.”

“So you drove to a McDonald’s to meet a stranger.”

They stood in her kitchen, three feet apart, trading damage assessments.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” he said again.

“You drove to a McDonald’s, Devin. You dressed up. You got a haircut. That’s not nothing — that’s a whole plan.”

“I was curious.”

“Curious,” she repeated. “You were curious.”

“We’ve been together a year and I’m twenty-three. I’m twenty-three years old, Jenna. I want to be young. I want to be—”

“You are young,” she said. “We are young. That’s what I’m saying. We’re young and we’re together and you still went and—”

“You were blowing up my phone,” he said. “Every text message, every time I got a notification — who’s that? What’s going on? Where are you? You were banging on my cousin’s door at three in the morning asking where I was.”

She opened her mouth.

“I’m not saying that makes it right,” he said. “But you asked why, so I’m telling you why. Because somewhere in the last six months, it started to feel like — I don’t know. Like you needed me to be somewhere every second. Like you were watching everything.”

She was quiet.

“I know that’s not how you meant it,” he said, and his voice was gentler than she expected. “I know you love me. But it felt like—”

“Like what?”

He looked at the ceiling. “Like being a lid on a pot that’s already boiling. I couldn’t move without something happening.”

She thought about that.

She thought about the three-in-the-morning trips to his cousin’s house. She thought about the way she’d felt, in the months leading up to finding that app — the low-grade static of worry that she couldn’t quite name, the way she reached for him constantly because reaching felt like the only way to make sure he was still there.

She had known something was wrong.

She had expressed it badly.

Those two things were both true.

“I still drove to a McDonald’s,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend that’s not what I did.”

“No,” she said. “You did.”

They stood there.

“I love you,” he said. It sounded like it cost him something.

“I know,” she said. “I love you too.”

“So what do we do?”

She thought about it for a moment.

“Delete the app,” she said. “And we try. We actually try — not just you deleting an app and me pretending nothing happened. We sit down and we figure out what’s been wrong for six months.”

He nodded slowly.

“But first,” she said, “I have to deal with something I did.”

She texted Scarlet the next morning.

It took her forty minutes to write a message that was four sentences long. She rewrote it five times. She deleted the version where she explained everything in detail, deleted the version that was too casual, deleted the version that started with okay so this is going to sound bad and just started again from the beginning.

Scarlet, I have to tell you something. I used your pictures on a fake dating profile to test Devin. I’m sorry. I should have asked you, and I should never have done it without telling you. I respect our friendship and I needed you to know.

She sent it.

She put her phone face-down.

She made coffee.

She drank the whole cup before she turned the phone back over.

No response.

She figured Scarlet was probably upset. Probably needed time. She told herself she’d give it a few days, let the initial anger settle, then follow up. That was what you did with real friendships — you gave them room to be mad at you, and then you showed back up.

She waited two days.

Then five.

Then two weeks.

Scarlet did not respond.

Five months passed.

This was the number that sat in the back of Jenna’s head like a stone — five months of silence from a woman she had walked through weather for, five months of a friendship that had existed since they were kids just going dark without explanation.

She had sent three more messages.

All of them read. None of them answered.

She had thought, more than once, about showing up. She knew where Scarlet lived. She knew which coffee shop she went to on Sunday mornings and which gym and which parking lot had the spot she preferred. She had the map of Scarlet’s life in her head the way you have it when someone has been your person for long enough.

But showing up uninvited to someone who had made it clear they didn’t want to be contacted felt like the wrong version of caring. It felt like the thing you could dress up as love but was really just not tolerating the other person’s choice.

So she waited.

And Devin waited with her, in a different way.

They had done the work. She would say that without drama — they had sat down, actually sat down, on a Thursday night with takeout going cold on the coffee table, and talked for three hours about the thing that had been building for six months. About her fear and his restlessness and the way those two things had fed each other in a loop that neither of them had known how to break. She said the things that were hard to say. He said the things that were harder. They had both cried a little, which felt embarrassing in the moment and right afterward.

They deleted the app together. She watched him do it. That mattered.

They were working.

But Scarlet was a wound that hadn’t closed, and Jenna had no way to close it by herself.

Then the show called.

She wasn’t sure what made her fill out the form.

She had watched the show on and off for years — the way you watch something you’d never admit to, the way it functions as background noise that occasionally grabs your whole attention. She had never thought of herself as the kind of person who ended up on a stage like that. She was private. She was the friend who knew everyone’s business and told none of her own.

But she had something she needed to say to Scarlet, and Scarlet had stopped letting her say it.

So she filled out the form.

She wrote about the catfishing and the McDonald’s and Devin and the app and the five months of silence. She wrote it straightforwardly, without making herself the hero of anything. She had done something wrong. She wanted to apologize. She didn’t know how else to get the apology delivered.

They called her back in three days.

She packed a bag.

She did not tell Devin she was going.

The studio was colder than she expected.

She sat in a green room that smelled like carpet and catering trays, wrapped in a jacket they’d given her because nobody told her television studios ran at sixty-five degrees regardless of season. A producer sat across from her with a clipboard, asking questions she’d already answered on the form, and Jenna answered them again with the practiced steadiness of someone who had spent five months sitting with a decision long enough to be sure of it.

She was here to say sorry.

That was the whole thing.

She was not here to relitigate what Devin had done, or defend herself, or perform anything. She had done something wrong to someone who had been her friend since they were thirteen years old, and she needed Scarlet to hear her say so.

“She’s agreed to come,” the producer told her.

Jenna exhaled.

“She’s not — happy about it,” the producer added carefully. “But she agreed.”

“Okay,” Jenna said.

“She may not be ready to accept the apology on camera.”

“I know.”

“Are you prepared for that?”

Jenna thought about Scarlet’s unread messages. About five months of silence from someone who had once walked her home from a party at two in the morning because Jenna had been crying too hard to drive. About the particular cruelty of being ghosted by someone who knows your whole history.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m prepared for that.”

She wasn’t, entirely. But she was going to be.

The host introduced her. She walked out.

The lights were brighter than she expected. The audience was louder. She sat in the chair and looked at the host and answered the questions clearly, without embellishment. She said what she had done. She said she was sorry for it. She said she was here because Scarlet deserved to hear it.

“And Devin?” the host asked.

Jenna paused. “We’re working on things.”

“He came out to meet Scarlet — the fake Scarlet — at McDonald’s. He drove there. He dressed up.” The host let that sit. “Does that change what you feel about him?”

“It told me what I needed to know,” Jenna said. “That’s why I did it. Not because I wanted to catch him, but because I needed to know. And now I do.”

“And?”

“And we’re working on it.” She met the camera. “That’s all I can tell you right now.”

The host nodded. “Okay. Let’s bring out Scarlet.”

Scarlet walked out like a woman who had spent five months deciding exactly how angry she was allowed to be and had landed on: very.

She was beautiful in the sharp-edged way she always was — wearing something she’d clearly chosen on purpose, hair done, chin up. She looked at Jenna the way you look at someone you used to know completely and have now had to relearn from a different angle.

She sat down.

She did not say anything.

“Scarlet,” Jenna said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want it,” Scarlet said.

The audience made a sound.

“I know—”

“No, I need you to actually hear me.” Scarlet’s voice was controlled in the way that comes from weeks of practice. “I don’t want the apology. Not because I’m being dramatic. But because you sat there and thought — when you were looking for a pretty face to use as bait — you thought of me. You went through your whole phone, your whole contact list, and you decided that my face was the one worth using. And you did it without asking me. Without one text, one phone call, nothing.”

“I was wrong,” Jenna said.

“You were more than wrong.” Scarlet looked at her hands. “When I was thirteen and everyone in school was making my life miserable — you were there. You walked to my apartment in five-degree weather with ice cream. You were the person who showed up.” Her jaw tightened. “And I thought that meant something.”

“It did mean something—”

“Then you used my face to catfish your boyfriend.”

Silence.

“I know,” Jenna said quietly. “I know that’s what I did.”

“Identity theft,” Scarlet said. “You know that’s what that is, right? It’s not just — it’s not just inconsiderate. You put my pictures on a profile I didn’t agree to, on an app I didn’t choose, talking to a man I don’t know. And now—” She stopped.

“Now what?” the host prompted.

Scarlet looked at the camera instead of at Jenna.

“He found me,” she said. “On the app. After the whole thing. He went looking — not for the fake profile, but for the real account. He found my actual social media. He has thousands of followers, he knows how these things work, and he tracked down my real profile and he messaged me.”

The audience erupted.

Jenna went very still.

“He hit on you?” the host said.

“He told me I was beautiful.” Scarlet’s voice was flat. “He said he’d seen my picture and wanted to get to know the real me.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

Jenna opened her mouth. Closed it.

“And then,” Scarlet continued, “I got the message from Jenna saying she wanted to go on the show together to apologize.” She turned back to Jenna finally. “So I figured — okay. Let’s see what happens.”

“You talked to him before you came here,” Jenna said.

Not a question.

“Yes.”

“You knew you were going to see him.”

“Yes.”

“Scarlet.” Jenna said her name like she was testing the weight of it. “You and I have been friends since we were thirteen years old.”

“I know.”

“And you came here—”

“I came here because I was angry,” Scarlet said. “And because I wanted you to look at me when I said I don’t accept your apology. I wanted you to hear it directly.” She paused. “What happened after that was its own thing.”

“But you knew he was going to be here.”

Scarlet was quiet.

“I’m not trying to be with him,” she finally said. “I’m not — that’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

“I wanted to see what a man looks like who uses a woman’s friendship to cover his own behavior. I wanted to see his face.” She looked toward the entrance of the stage. “And I want him to explain himself.”

The host looked at the camera.

“Well,” he said. “That sounds like a cue.”

Devin walked out to an audience that had already made up its mind about him.

He took it well, on the surface. He walked straight, shoulders back, looked at Jenna first — that was the one thing Jenna noticed, and it registered somewhere complicated. He looked at her first.

Then he looked at Scarlet, who looked back at him with the particular expression of a woman who has decided she has nothing to lose.

“Devin,” the host said. “You want to explain yourself?”

“I went to the McDonald’s,” Devin said. “I’m not going to sit here and say I didn’t. I went because I thought I was meeting someone. I thought it was real.”

“You thought you were cheating,” Jenna said.

“I thought I was going to have a conversation.”

“You wore your good clothes and drove forty minutes to a McDonald’s at eight at night to have a conversation.”

“Jenna—”

“I’m just saying what happened.”

“And I’m not denying what happened.” He looked at her directly. “I did it. I’m telling you I did it. What I’m also saying is—” He stopped. Started again. “She had me on edge every day for six months. Looking through my phone, showing up places, blowing up my notifications every single time—”

“So you got on a dating app.”

“Yeah. Because I felt trapped.”

“You felt trapped,” Jenna repeated. “In a relationship.”

“At twenty-three years old? Yeah. I did.”

Jenna was quiet for a moment. The audience filled the silence with noise, and she waited for it to die down.

“I know I was too much,” she said. “I know I came on too strong. I know the three a.m. trips to your cousin’s weren’t okay, I know the phone thing was too much, I know all of that. We already talked about all of that.” She looked at him. “But there’s a difference between I need space and I’m going to download Plenty of Fish and meet women at McDonald’s. You could have just said you needed space.”

“Would you have given it to me?”

The question hung there.

Jenna didn’t answer immediately.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Maybe not. Not then. Not six months ago. But I deserved the chance to try.”

Something shifted in Devin’s face. Not guilt exactly — something more complicated than guilt. The look of a person who is realizing, maybe for the first time, that they had options they didn’t take.

“You went and found her real profile,” Jenna said.

“Yeah.”

“After everything. After you knew what happened. You still went and found her.”

“I was curious—”

“You’re always curious,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

He looked at Scarlet.

Scarlet looked back at him with something that was not quite contempt and not quite amusement.

“He wasn’t even worth it,” Scarlet said. “I want you to know that. Not saying it for drama. Saying it because you should know the level of what you’re dealing with.”

The audience lost it completely.

Devin’s jaw tightened.

“I brought flowers,” he said, almost to himself.

Jenna looked at the flowers he was holding — she’d noticed them when he walked in, had filed the information away. Roses. Gas station roses, by the look of them, but roses.

“For who?” she asked.

He looked at her.

He looked at Scarlet.

Back at Jenna.

“I don’t know,” he said, and that might have been the most honest thing he’d said all day.

Jenna looked at him for a long time.

One year. She had given this man one year of mornings and arguments and the particular intimacy of knowing someone well enough to know their patterns. She had loved him in the full-body way you love someone when you’re young enough that loving someone still feels like a discovery.

And she had been so afraid of losing him that she had become the reason he left.

Not because she was wrong to love him. But because fear dressed up as love becomes a cage, and cages make people desperate.

She had catfished him.

He had gone to the McDonald’s.

They had both, in their own ways, already broken the thing they were trying to save.

“I need to ask you something,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Do you actually want to be with me?”

He was quiet.

“Not do you love me — I know you love me. I love you too. That was never the question.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Do you want to be with me? Right now. Like this. The actual version of what we are — not some idea of it, not what it was at the beginning. Me and you trying to figure out how to do this right.”

The studio was completely still.

Devin looked at the floor. He looked at his hands. He looked at the flowers, which were still just sitting there, unchosen, pointed at nobody.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was the second honest thing.

“Okay,” Jenna said. “Then we have our answer.”

She stood up.

She did not walk off the stage dramatically. She did not make a gesture. She just stood up, the way you stand up at the end of a meal that’s been over for twenty minutes — not angry, not destroyed, just finished.

“Jenna,” he said.

“You have your flowers,” she said. “Figure out who they’re for.”

She looked at Scarlet one more time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you don’t want it. I’m saying it anyway.”

Scarlet watched her.

“Take care of yourself,” Scarlet said. Which was not forgiveness. But it was something.

Jenna walked back to her chair.

She sat down.

She breathed.

The drive home was four hours.

She had taken the bus to the studio — the show had arranged travel, and she’d figured she would take the bus back, give herself time to think. She sat by the window with her jacket pulled up around her shoulders and watched the landscape outside shift from city to suburb to open highway, and she thought about all of it.

She thought about the app icon on his phone. Tuesday night, reaching for the remote. The specific second when everything changed.

She thought about Scarlet, thirteen years old, being made fun of in a hallway, and Jenna stepping into it without being asked.

She thought about five-degree weather and ice cream and what it means when someone shows up.

She thought about Devin’s flowers, still in his hand at the end, pointed at no one.

She had gotten what she came for.

Not the reconciliation — she understood now that reconciliation wasn’t actually what she’d been after, even if that’s what she’d told herself. She had been after the truth. Not the specific truth of whether he’d cheated, though that mattered too. The larger truth. The shape of the thing.

And she had it now.

The shape was: he was twenty-three years old and not ready. She was twenty-two and had been trying to hold something together that needed to be let go. They had loved each other the way you love something when you’re young enough that you don’t yet know what love can survive — which is most things, as it turns out, but only if both people actually choose it.

He had not chosen it.

She had been making the choice for both of them for six months.

That was exhausting.

She was done being exhausted.

She texted Scarlet from the bus.

I know you don’t want to talk. I’m not going to keep chasing you. But I want you to know that everything I did for you at thirteen — the ice cream, the walks, the two a.m. calls — I did that because you were worth doing it for. Not because I expected anything back. Not as leverage.

She paused.

And I’m sorry I used your face. That was wrong. You didn’t deserve that from someone who was supposed to be your friend.

She sent it.

She put her phone in her bag.

She watched the highway move past the window.

This time, she didn’t wait for a response.

She already knew what kind of answer she needed, and it didn’t come from a text message.

Three weeks later, a woman sat in a coffee shop near her apartment with a laptop and a mug of something that had gone lukewarm, and she was applying for jobs.

Not because she needed to — she had a job. But a better one had opened up, and she was putting in for it, and she was filling out the application with the particular focus of someone who has recently been reminded that she is capable of handling difficult things.

Her phone was on the table.

A message came in.

She glanced at it.

It was from an unknown number. She almost didn’t open it. She had a policy now about unknown numbers — developed over the course of one very educational year — which was that messages from unknown numbers could wait until she felt like dealing with them.

She let it wait.

She finished the section on professional references.

Then she picked up the phone and opened the message.

This is Scarlet. I’m not saying we’re fine. But I read your message on the bus and I’ve been thinking about it for three weeks and I think I owe you a coffee.

Jenna read it twice.

She set the phone down.

She picked up her lukewarm mug and drank the rest of it.

Then she typed back: I know a place. Tuesday?

The reply came in thirty seconds.

Tuesday.

Jenna put her phone face-down on the table.

She went back to her application.

She submitted it.

She picked up the phone again — not to check for messages, but because she wanted to look at something. She opened Plenty of Fish. The real one this time. Not a fake profile, not someone else’s face, not a test.

Her own account. With her own pictures. She had made it three days ago, quietly, without telling anyone.

She scrolled through it for a minute.

Then she closed the app.

She wasn’t ready yet. Not today.

But she had made the profile.

And making the profile, this time, as herself — that felt like the beginning of something.

Not a trap.

Not a test.

Just a door, propped open, waiting to see who knocked.

She found the app on a Tuesday night.

Not because she was looking. Just reaching for a song. Just a screen, brushing to life in her hand.

Funny how things start.

Funny what a lit screen can change.

Somewhere across the city, Devin still had his flowers.

Somewhere, Scarlet was deciding whether Tuesday worked for her.

And Jenna drove home with the window down just a little, letting the cold air in, thinking about all the versions of herself she had been in the last twelve months.

She was twenty-two years old.

She was done being afraid of what she didn’t know.

She opened her window the rest of the way.

She drove.