The text arrived at 2:13 in the morning.
“I want it to look like nothing was ever there,” I said.
He stood up and looked at me. Not with judgment. Just evaluation. “We can do that.”
We arranged the date. I arranged movers for the furniture and boxes I’d been quietly packing for a week. I called my college roommate, Dana, who lived forty minutes away and had a guest room and a dog named Biscuit and absolutely no patience for men like Ethan. She said “get here as fast as you can” without asking a single question.
The week Ethan got married on a beach somewhere with turquoise water, I packed my life into a moving truck. I took everything that was mine and some things that were ours and nothing that was his. I took my daughter’s painted coffee mug. I took the framed photo from our first apartment, the one where we’re both laughing and slightly blurry, taken by a stranger on the street who didn’t quite understand cameras. I don’t know why I took that one. Maybe because I wanted proof that there was a before. That it hadn’t all been a lie from the beginning.
