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run. And nobody was going to give a shit about how he had given up college, how he had lost the only girl he’d ever loved, how he had spent Friday nights mopping up vomit rather than hanging out with the people whohad once been his friends. Nobody cared about that because it didn’t matter. Andrew was the bad guy. He was the one to blame.
    Cryer sat silently for a long while, staring at Andrew as he replayed the drama that had become his life. A compassionate smile worked its way across the store manager’s mouth.
    “I appreciate your opening up,” he said.
    Drew blinked, that smile giving him hope. Maybe it
did
matter; maybe all that self-sacrifice was about to pay off, right here, right now.
    “But given the fact that you didn’t even put in notice...”
    Drew shook his head. “What?”
    “Well, you have to see this from my perspective,” Cryer told him. “Admittedly, it doesn’t look good.”
    “But I have experience,” Drew protested, his voice cracking with emotion. He hated himself for how desperate he sounded. “There’s no reason for me to leave
this
job. I
need
it.”
    “And I appreciate that,” Cryer said. “I really do. But there’s just nothing I can do.”
    Drew’s stomach twisted. The back of his throat went sour. The nerves that had taken hold of his insides flared into anger; the guilt that Cryer had forced him to regurgitate roared into rage. He felt used. Cryer had known he was going to turn Drew down from the get-go, but he sat there anyway, allowing him to pour his heart out, and for what? Drew rose from his chair, trying to keep calm.
    “I’m really sorry, Andrew,” Cryer insisted, standing as well. “I know it’s rough.”
    “Really?” The question tumbled from his lips before he could suppress it. He wanted to scream, to tell Cryer he was an asshole; he wanted to flip his desk the way he had flipped his mother’s coffee table and tell him that nobody shopped at Thriftway anyway; he didn’t need this job. But he
did
.
    And then he remembered Harlow—her smiling face, the way the skirt of her dress swayed like a metronome when she walked,how her hair had glowed in the morning sun, the way she had brushed his hair aside as if assuring him that everything was fine, everything would be OK.
    He exhaled a slow breath, glanced up at Cryer again.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, “you’re right.”
    Cryer forced a smile, extending his hand across his desk. “Good luck,” he said. “With everything.”
    Andrew shook the man’s hand with a faint nod and took a step toward the door.
    “Really,” Cryer told him. “I mean it.”
    When Drew looked up at him again, Cryer really did look like he meant it. And somehow, that made up for how hard it had been for Andrew to make his confession. He hadn’t told anybody what he had been dealing with. To see that it had affected a stranger, even in the tiniest of ways, made him think that maybe he wasn’t in the wrong after all; that maybe, sometime soon, the weight of that guilt would lift from his shoulders, and he’d finally be free.

    Creekside had a total of five grocery stores, so after the disaster at Thriftway, he visited the rest of them, minus the Kroger he used to work at less than a week before. He filled out three applications despite two of the managers telling him they weren’t hiring, and scored another interview only to be told that they’d call him later. Drew tried to be optimistic, but that “later” felt like a “never.”
    His frustration started to mount.
    He dropped into a couple of video game stores, a bike shop, three coffee places, and a Dairy Queen. Everyone shook their heads. Everyone gave him an apologetic smile, a shrug of the shoulders. It appeared that Creekside was far from immune from the Capitol disease. The economy had gone to shit, even in the heartland.
    Despite the work he’d put into Mickey’s house, he didn’t want to go back there yet, didn’t want to face the bitter reality that he was