His apartment smelled faintly of laundry detergent and the coffee he had made that morning. He pulled clean sheets from a closet, handed me a towel, and told me where to find an extra toothbrush. Then he opened two bottles of beer and turned on a basketball game recorded earlier that evening. We sat side by side on his couch while the players crossed the court in bright uniforms and the commentators said things neither of us was listening to.
After almost an hour, he asked, "You think she was cheating?"
"I think she'd been halfway gone for a long time," I said. "I don't know how far she went tonight."
"Does it change what she told you?"
I watched a player miss a free throw. "No," I admitted. "I guess it doesn't."
He let that answer settle. He did not tell me she was evil or that I would find someone better by next weekend. He did not offer to call her or explain why she was wrong, and he did not turn my misery into a speech. He simply said, "Then you made a decision. Now we've got to help you live with it."
I told him I was afraid I would take her back if she sounded sorry enough. That admission embarrassed me more than anything I had said all night, but he did not laugh. "Then don't decide anything tonight," he said. "Get through tonight. Tomorrow we can work out the lease and the rest of your stuff."
At three in the morning my phone began vibrating against the nightstand. Sarah's name lit the screen, followed by a message asking where I was. A second message arrived before I had finished reading the first. She said this was not funny, that I needed to come home, and that she had not meant what she said.
I stared at the screen. Her messages grew more urgent, then irritated, then pleading, moving through familiar changes in tone so quickly I could almost hear her voice. She called me dramatic, insisted she had been joking, and finally wrote that we could talk about the whole thing if I would just come back. I could feel my fingers preparing an apology before I had made a decision to send one.
I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling. Her explanation was that she had been joking, but I remembered the deliberate way she had checked her lipstick while I stood in the doorway trying to ask a question. I remembered the words "basically over" and the laugh that followed them. If I went back because she was frightened by an empty apartment, I would be teaching both of us that the relationship could survive anything except my refusal to absorb it.
I turned the phone off. It felt dramatic in its own small way, like shutting a door in a storm, and for several minutes I listened for a vibration that could not come. Then exhaustion overtook me. I fell asleep without learning where Sarah had been, who she had met, or what she intended to do about it, and for that night I decided I did not need to know.