My Fiancé Chose My Dying Cousin Instead of Me

Three days before the wedding, I packed up eight years in six boxes.

It didn't take long. That surprised me. I thought it would take longer, that the walls would fight me somehow, that Colt's apartment would hold onto pieces of me the way I'd held onto pieces of him. But no. My toothbrush. My side of the closet. The blender I bought because he never used the one his mother sent. It all fit into six boxes and a garment bag I never picked back up from the boutique.

I worked through the apartment room by room, and I didn't let myself stop and remember things. Remembering was a trap. Remembering was how I'd lost eight years in the first place.

The fireplace was the last thing.

I knelt in front of it with a shoebox on my lap — the one I kept under the bed, the one Colt never opened because he didn't know it existed. Love letters from our first year, back when he still wrote things down instead of texting them. Polaroids from a trip to Vermont, both of us squinting into the sun. Ticket stubs from a Springsteen concert he'd surprised me with for my birthday, back when surprises from him still felt like gifts and not warnings. A pressed flower from the bouquet he gave me after my mother's funeral, flattened between two pieces of wax paper for six years.

I fed it all into the fire one handful at a time.

The letters went first. The paper curled at the edges, browned, then caught all at once, and for a second I could see his handwriting glow orange before it disappeared. I didn't cry. I kept waiting to, the way you wait for a storm you can feel coming, and it just never broke.

The Polaroids melted strange, the plastic coating bubbling before the flame ate through. I watched our faces warp and blacken. I thought about how young we looked. How sure.

Last was the chain.

I unclasped it from around my neck — I'd started wearing it again these past few weeks, tucked under my collar, some old habit I couldn't shake even while I was planning to burn the man who gave it to me right out of my life. The soda can tab caught the firelight, dull aluminum, a little rusted at the edge from eight years of sweat and skin. "Placeholder," he'd said. "Until I can afford the real thing."

He'd afforded the real thing. He just hadn't given it to me.

I held it over the flames for a second longer than I needed to. Then I let go.

It didn't burn so much as it warped — the metal bending, blistering, going black at the edges before it dropped down into the coals and disappeared into the rest of the ash. I dropped the chain in after it, watched the links go dark one by one like a little dying constellation.

Then I stood up, brushed off my knees, and put my key on the kitchen counter. Not dramatically. Just set it down, next to the fruit bowl, where he'd find it when he finally noticed I was gone.

I didn't leave a note. There was nothing left to say that the empty apartment wouldn't say better.

---

The drive to JFK was quiet. No music. Just the sound of tires on wet asphalt and my own breathing, slower than it had been in weeks.

I checked in at the first-class counter with one suitcase and a carry-on, and the woman behind the desk smiled at me like I was just another traveler, not a woman who'd spent the last hour burning the only proof she'd ever loved someone. I smiled back. It felt easier than it should have.

At the gate, I texted Kalani.

*Green light.*

Three dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. Finally: *On it. Don't look back, boo. Not even once.*

I put my phone on airplane mode and didn't look at it again until we landed.

Once we were in the air, I ordered a glass of Barolo, because it sounded like the kind of thing a woman does when she's starting over, and because I liked the way it sat dark and heavy in the glass, nothing like champagne, nothing like anything that had happened to me on a rooftop in Midtown.

I turned toward the window as we climbed. Manhattan spread out below in a grid of light, small and bright and completely unaware that I was leaving it. I watched the buildings shrink. I watched the bridges go thin as thread. Then the clouds came up underneath the plane like a floor sliding into place, and the city was gone.

I waited for the grief to hit. I'd been waiting for it all day, honestly — braced for it the way you brace for a punch you know is coming. It never came. Instead there was just a strange, clean quiet, like a room after you've swept it.

I took a sip of the wine. It tasted like something I might actually enjoy, someday, without thinking about who I was drinking it with or why.

For the first time in weeks, I didn't feel like crying.

I felt like sleeping. So I did.