My Boyfriend Staged Affairs to Humiliate Me

The café in Brooklyn had exactly six tables and a chalkboard menu that misspelled "cappuccino" in a different way every week. I liked that about it. I liked that nothing here had anything to do with Carson, or Kyra, or the version of me that used to check her phone under the table like it was a leash.

Enzo was already there when I walked in, folded into a chair too small for him, a mug in front of him he hadn't touched. He stood up when he saw me. Didn't rush around the table. Just stood, and waited, and let me come to him.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

I sat down across from him and wrapped both bandaged hands around the mug the waitress brought before I'd even ordered. The heat pressed through the gauze, dull and far away, the way most of my pain had started to feel lately — present, but no longer the loudest thing in the room.

He looked at my hands. He didn't ask.

So I told him.

"It's over," I said. No warm-up. No easing in. Three years didn't deserve a gentle sentence. "Carson and I are done. Actually done. I moved out. I have a studio with bad carpet and a radiator that sounds like it's dying. I burned my hands pulling my grandmother's locket out of a fire he started, and I don't feel anything when I think about him anymore except tired." I took a breath. "I wanted you to hear it from me. Not from anywhere else."

Enzo didn't say anything right away. He just listened, the way he always did, like my words were something worth the full weight of his attention and not just a pause before his turn to talk. The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Somewhere a spoon clinked against a cup. I watched his face for the thing I'd been braced for without realizing it — pity, or worse, triumph — and found neither.

When I finished, he reached across the table. Slowly. Like he was approaching something wild that might startle.

He turned my bandaged hand over, palm up, resting it in his.

"You know what happens to meteorites when they re-enter the atmosphere?" he said.

I blinked at him. "Is this a science lecture? Right now?"

"Just answer the question."

"...They burn."

"They burn," he agreed, tracing one finger, feather-light, along the edge of the gauze. "Thousands of degrees. Most of them don't survive it. But some do. They burn, and they land, and they're still here." He looked up at me. "Still here, Avery."

I stared at him. The steam from my coffee curled up between us, and for a second I couldn't find a single word in my entire vocabulary, three years of writing taglines for a living and I had nothing.

"That," I finally said, "is the nerdiest thing anyone has ever said to me."

He grinned, that easy, unbothered grin that never once made me feel like I owed him anything for it. "Did it work?"

It had. God help me, it had.

I told myself the apartment visit would take four minutes. In and out. Passport from the drawer in the study, nothing else, no goodbyes, no closure I didn't already have.

I used my old key one last time. The door swung open onto a scene so carefully arranged it took me a full second to understand I was looking at a set, not a memory.

Kyra was on the couch in one of my old robes — I recognized the stitching on the cuff — her hair artfully mussed, her legs tucked under her exactly the way she'd sat the night she dropped my grandmother's locket on the floor. Carson stood over her, shirt half-buttoned, and when I stepped inside neither of them scrambled. Neither of them looked surprised. They looked like they'd been waiting for their cue.

Carson's mouth curved. "Couldn't stay away."

"I need my passport," I said.

Something in his expression shifted, the smirk sliding into something colder, more practiced. He stood, straightened his shirt like he was about to walk into a boardroom instead of his own living room.

"You walk out that door with that passport," he said, voice flat, "and I will personally make sure every agency, every studio, every firm in this city knows your name. You will never work in advertising in New York again."

Behind him, Kyra's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but close enough that I saw it.

I walked past both of them into the study. The drawer stuck a little, the way it always had, and I had to jiggle it before it gave. My passport was right where I'd left it, tucked under a folder of old contracts I no longer needed. I picked it up, closed the drawer, and turned around.

Carson was watching from the doorway, arms crossed, certain — still, after everything — that he held some kind of leverage over me.

"Good," I said. "I won't need this city anymore."

I walked past him, down the hall, out the front door. I didn't close it behind me. Let them sit in whatever draft came through. I was already thinking about gate numbers, about a jar of stones on a desk that wasn't in this apartment anymore, about a man who thought burning meant surviving too.