Daniel Reyes. Her ex from before me. The one who, in her telling, had been a mistake she barely remembered. The one whose name had quietly stopped coming up about a year ago, which I had taken as a good sign. I said, "Yes, please put him on it."
And then I sat in a parking garage with the engine off until my hands stopped shaking. I waited until Wednesday night. She was on the couch with her laptop half watching something. I put my phone on the cushion between us with the folio open, and I asked her exactly one question. Who is the second guest?
She looked at it. She didn't flinch, didn't cry, didn't do a single one of the things I had spent two nights bracing for. She sighed like I'd asked her to take the trash out. She said, "Okay, so you're going through my things now." I said, "You booked it on my points."
She said, "And that's what you want to talk about." Then she gave me the version that it had been building for months. That Daniel understood a part of her I never bothered to look at. That nothing had actually happened until that weekend, which was a lie I could disprove with a bar tab. And that if I was going to turn this into a whole thing, fine, turn it into a whole thing.
Then she laughed. Not a nervous laugh, a real one, short and dismissive, the laugh you give a kid who threatens to run away from home. She said, "What are you going to do? Break up with me? Go ahead.
Break up with me." Because she had done the math, too. She knew what I paid for. She knew she hadn't put a deposit down anywhere in 3 years. She knew I was the kind of man who talks things through, who wants to fix it, who would be back on that couch by Sunday with a plan for us.
So, I didn't answer her. I have never in my life been so grateful for something I didn't say. I got up, walked into the bedroom, and took down the silver suitcase. She followed me with her arms crossed, still enjoying herself, right up until the third shirt went in. "My shirt," she said.
"What are you doing?" I opened my drawer and kept going. Socks, work clothes, the hoodie she used to steal in the winter. She said, "This is insane. We are in the middle of a conversation."
We weren't. She had been having a conversation. I had been getting a diagnosis. I packed my razor and my charger and the good headphones. I took the folder out of the filing cabinet with my birth certificate and my passport and my tax returns, because whatever was coming next, I wanted that paper in my hand and not in her apartment.