The entire song is a story told in pure metaphors. It doesn’t really matter to me if she wrote it for someone or with someone in mind or if it was just something she thought up, like Story-tellers do.
The metaphor is that of someone who pulls off something like a double con. She commits a crime with someone with the intention of double-crossing him because she was already disenchanted with him. She then drove away with someone else in a getaway car, a Bonnie & Clyde story. Then she leaves Partner No. 2 the first chance she gets. To him, she quips: don’t pretend it was such a mystery, think about the place where you first met me. She tells him their partnership had never been meant to last because nothing good ever started on a getaway car.
It is a dramatic telling of a romance that was never a love story. She wanted a reason to leave her current boyfriend but didn’t really have any, and was probably too cowardly to break up with him. She was looking for an out when she met someone somewhere. She broke trust with her boyfriend and got together with this new exciting boy, cheating on her boyfriend and running away with Boy No.2 in a mad daze, a heady romance even as her boyfriend was left hurting. But things that begin with hurting someone that badly has a way of not working out. Karma, maybe. So she left Boy No.2 again and tells him: we were never meant to be, remember how it was we first started out? Us traitors never win.
The song is very self-aware and she never tries to rationalize her betrayal and cheating. Her new romance not working was just what she reaped for the shit she sowed. There is no self-pity. There is just some serious “it is what it is” acceptance and a whole lot of embracing a “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences to my actions playing out” deal.
She did know it from the first Old Fashioned that this new romance was cursed. They never had a shotgun shot in the dark, driving around in a getaway car.
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