Chapter 6 #3
You knew your heart was still broken when you gave him your number.
You knew it was still bleeding when you let him take you to dinner, said yes, and kept saying yes, and you chose him anyway because he was safe and uncomplicated, and nothing about him was going to wreck you the way you had already been wrecked.
Because clean hands, good shoes, and a man who asked follow-up questions felt like the sensible choice when the alternative was continuing to grieve someone you were supposed to be over.
So you picked reasonable over real, called it moving forward, and told yourself that was what growing up looked like.
As if you could outrun it all by stepping into someone else’s life.
As if safety were something a man could hand you.
As if you, of all people, after everything, should not have known by now that the things you run toward to escape the pain have a way of becoming their own kind of pain. You knew better than that at the age of ten.
I throw the frame at the wall, and it hits with a crack that is deeply satisfying.
The frame splits on impact. Glass scatters across the floor in bright, skittering fragments that catch the light as they spread, little shards of something that was never as solid as it looked. The photograph slips free from the ruin and lands face down on the floor.
I leave it exactly there. Damien can see what I think of our so-called relationship.
I grab my apartment key, work it loose, then place it on the counter beside the bowl where Damien keeps his mail, loose change, receipts, and every other tiny piece of evidence proving this apartment has always been his.
I expect tears to come, the ache in my chest to finally split open and announce itself, but they never arrive.
Maybe later. Maybe grief is just running behind tonight.
I load both bags into the back of my car, sit in the driver’s seat with my hands in my lap and the engine off, and wait for it again.
The pain stays absent. Part of me thinks it should be here by now. A relationship ending. A future now lying in shattered glass on a floor Damien will come home to at some point tonight.
Grief does not rise; instead, it is relief, which means the unhappiness was there long before tonight. It means my body knew the truth and carried it quietly for months while my mind kept insisting everything was fine.
I start the engine and pull out into the street.
One mile. That is all the distance between Damien’s apartment and my old apartment building on Havemeyer. One mile, and somehow I managed to get lost in it for two years.
The building comes into view.
Four stories, brick, a buzzer panel that has never fully worked. This is the apartment Rainer helped me find after Zane was committed. I lived here from nineteen to twenty-three, the longest I had ever stayed anywhere in my life, longer than any place that had ever asked me to call it home.
When I moved out to live in Damien’s apartment, I stood on the sidewalk with my green duffel and cried, telling myself it was about change.
About growing up. About moving forward. I believed it because it was easier than the truth, and some part of me already knew I was making a mistake.
And when Cassie turned eighteen and her last foster home was done with her, I stood on the street waiting for her, a key in my hand.
She looked at it for a long moment without speaking, and I watched something move across her face that she would never, in a thousand years, call what it was.
She looked up at me and said, “I’m not crying. I just have something in both eyes.”
Then she hugged me, and we walked inside together.
We lived in that apartment together for almost four years.
We painted the kitchen yellow one weekend without telling the landlord, then spent the following Monday in the hallway, badly apologizing to him.
We threw parties too loud for the building.
We ate cereal for dinner when money was tight and takeout on the floor when it wasn’t.
We took turns falling apart. Took turns pretending we weren’t.
We built something in those rooms that had nothing to do with lease agreements and everything to do with choosing each other, over and over, in all the small, unglamorous ways that actually count.
She is the closest thing to a sister I have ever had.
And I have missed her more than I care to admit.
I find a park outside my old apartment building, grab the bags from the back seat, and walk to the front door.
For a second, I just stand here with my finger hovering over the buzzer. Then I press 2B.
Static crackles through the speaker before Cassie’s voice comes through. “Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
The door buzzes open.
I take the stairs because the elevator in this building has always been slow, and I don’t have the patience to stand in a metal box with my whole life packed into two bags.
By the time I reach the second floor, the door to 2B is already open. Cassie stands in the doorway, wearing an oversized flannel shirt and shorts, her hair shoved into a messy bun. She holds a mug of something hot in one hand, and her eyes flick over me.
The expensive bag on my shoulder. The duffel in my other hand. My face, which clearly says more than I would like.
Her expression shifts for half a second before she lifts her mug in a ceremonial toast.
“Well,” she says, “it fucking took you long enough.”