chapter 12
I boxed things in silence for a week, moving like a careful demolition crew through a life I had once believed in. Each item I wrapped felt like a small apology and a small liberation—an apology to the girl who had waited for six years for someone else to decide for her, and a liberation from the quiet accumulation of losses that had settled around my ribs.
The apartment smelled faintly of his cologne even after I’d aired the sheets, a ghostly sweetness that made the scissors tremble in my hand the first time I cut a ribbon from a shirt. I left the photos face-down in the frames. I didn’t want to burn the memories or parade them off like trophies; I wanted them to be ordinary objects, easy to slide into a box and harder to weaponize later.
Sophie came over with pizza and plants. She insisted on bringing things to make the new place mine—the kind of practical tenderness that stayed with you. While I taped the last box, she sat on the floor, hands balled around a mug, and said, “Promise me you’ll not say yes to his next ‘I’ll make this up’ unless it’s in writing and notarized.”
I laughed, a tired little sound that felt real enough to startle me. “Notarized apologies, got it.”
She reached into her bag and handed me an envelope, sealed with a little floral sticker. “For when you need it,” she said, and I almost cried because she had the uncanny ability to hand me exactly what I needed without a single lecture.
The envelope contained a Polaroid—a throwback of that rainy afternoon, two umbrellas entangled, me mid-laugh, him grinning at whatever fumbled line I’d said—and something else: a folded scrap of paper, edges worn. It read, in a hand I recognized immediately because I had seen it a hundred times tucked into laptop cases and backpacks: I miss you already. Can’t wait to come home to you.