The photo loads slow on my phone, like even the internet is embarrassed for me. Callen in a charcoal suit, Skye's hand curled into his elbow, both of them lit gold under the Romero Global step-and-repeat. Her head tilted just so. His face doing that practiced calm he wears for cameras, the one I used to think was shyness.
The caption reads: *Romero heir reunited with cherished companion at charity preview.* Cherished companion. Not fiancée. Not almost-wife. I search the whole article for my name and find nothing, not even a ghost of it, which is funny, because a ghost of me is exactly what's reading this.
I picture the room before the shutter clicked. Diane at his shoulder, murmuring numbers — stock price, sentiment, the optics of grief versus the optics of a fairy tale resurrected. The publicist saying something soft and practical like *let them write the story, it's a good story.* And Callen, saying nothing, which is its own kind of yes. He didn't correct a single word. He just stood there and let the caption become true by not making it false.
I put the phone down on the floor of the sublet and don't pick it up again for a long time.
—
I go back to the penthouse on a Thursday, when I know his calendar has him in a boardroom on the forty-first floor and hers has her wrapped in seaweed somewhere on the Upper East Side. I still have the key. Nobody's changed the code on the elevator, which tells me something about how little I've been thought about since I left.
The apartment smells like her perfume now, something sharp and citrus laid over the ghost of my candles. The reclaimed table's absence is a clean rectangle of unfaded floor, a scar shaped like a year of my life. I don't look at the mantel where the photo used to hang. I don't look at much of anything.
Biscuit finds me before I find her, streaking out from behind the curtain with her ears — ear — flat, and then she stops, sniffs, and climbs me like I never left. I sit on the floor with her in the empty rectangle where the table used to be and let her push her face into my collarbone.
"Hey, baby," I whisper. "Hey."
She purrs so hard her whole body shakes with it, and I hold her until my knees ache from the hardwood, until the light through the window goes the color of a bruise. I don't take my restoration tools, even though I know they're probably in a box in some closet, spared from the landfill by the same man who threw a fit over a picture frame and let a woman erase everything else. I don't take the jewelry. I don't take a single thing that has his fingerprints on it.
"Someone's going to take care of you," I tell her, and I don't know yet who that will be, but I know it won't be Skye — Skye who flinches when the cat looks at her too long, who's already muttering about shelters. I set Biscuit down gently by her food bowl, and she watches me go with her one good ear swiveled toward the door like she already knows.
I don't cry until I'm three blocks away.
—
I walk the whole way back to Brooklyn instead of taking the train. Past the West Village bookshop, closed for renovation now, brown paper taped over the windows like a bandage over a wound that healed wrong. I stand there a minute, remembering rain that wasn't an accident, an umbrella that was a location pin, a smile that was a payment. I don't feel angry anymore. I feel like I'm reading an old book I already know the ending to.
I go past Green-Wood without meaning to, feet just carrying me there, and I stand at the gates and don't go in. Somewhere past those gates is a headstone with a dead woman's name on it, and somewhere past that is the spot where I said yes to a ring held out over her grave, believing it was ours. I don't say goodbye to her either. I don't owe her that.
I don't say goodbye to anyone. That's the thing nobody tells you about leaving — you think there'll be a scene, a door slamming, someone's face when they realize. There isn't. There's just a woman walking through a city that doesn't know it's about to lose her, holding nothing, owed nothing, owing nothing back.
—
The surgical suite is colder than I remember, all white tile and low hum. Averie's hands are steady when she lays the forms in front of me, less steady when she starts talking numbers again — re-transplant lists, survival curves, *there's still time, Brynn, there's still—*
"More time to be what?" I ask her.
She doesn't answer that. Nobody ever does.
I sign my name without the painkillers, feeling every letter, every second of it real. I hand her the envelope one more time, say the instructions one more time — white box, ribbon, nine sharp, during, not before — and then I lie back on the table and let the lights swallow the ceiling whole.
