Chapter 3

I moved out on a Tuesday. Good day for it, if you know how to spend one, and I do.

The place didn't want me to go. Five years of me was soaked into the walls. Lights came up warm, the water ran hot on the first turn, the elevator was always waiting.

None of that would last. Not for him.

The heat would hang in these rooms for months, the way a house stays warm past midnight after you kill the furnace at noon. Next winter he'd stand in here and wonder why he was cold, and never once think of the woman who used to make the water run hot.

I took three suitcases and left the rest. All of it could go on being his. All of it would start letting him down in its own slow time.

The movers I'd booked bailed an hour out. Would've wrecked anybody else's morning. Twenty minutes later a van pulled up to the wrong address, the driver leaning out the window. His first job had fallen through, did I need a hand, cash, half rate.

You stop bracing for the fall and you notice the net was strung under you the whole time.

I called my mother from the stairwell while he loaded the last of it. She still thought I was safe. She still thought Sullivan hung the moon.

She's sick enough now that I'll only get to break her heart the once. So I didn't do it today. I told her the weather was nice and let her keep the man she thought she had a little longer.

Arianna was waiting in the lobby.

She sat like she owned it, filming her own shoes. Stood up when she saw me, because she wanted this part. The part where the other woman hauls her bags out the door.

"Wow. You're actually doing it," she said. "After all that screaming."

"Here I am."

She looked at me a second too long. "You seem different."

"I stopped wasting my time." I put the bag down. "You'll get it. Give it a year."

"Is that supposed to be a threat?"

"Take it however you want."

"…Take what how?"

"Everything that's gone your way lately?" I picked the bag back up. "You've been standing next to me. That's it. That's the whole thing."

"That doesn't even mean anything."

"You'll see."

Behind her the revolving door jammed with a heavy clunk, catching a delivery guy mid-step. Then every light in the lobby ceiling stuttered at once and went out. The front desk phone started ringing in the dark and wouldn't quit.

Somewhere behind me a woman said, "What is going on today."

I stepped around Arianna and out into the sun, which found me the second I hit the sidewalk. A cab I hadn't called sat at the curb. I got in.

My phone buzzed before I'd given the driver an address. A number I didn't know.

Walker Dunn, the sidewalk-interview guy. Took me three days to track you down.

Then, a second later:

Somebody sent me your husband's clip and said I had to find the wife. So here I am. Same question, same camera. What would you tell yourself five years ago?

I looked out at the city, all of it leaning my way now.

Four million strangers had watched my husband wish me out of his life.

Where, and when, I typed.