During the second week, the stories became more serious. Sarah's friends were getting calls in the middle of the night and messages that demanded immediate reassurance. She posted photographs with captions about betrayal and loyalty, deleted them, and posted new ones that contradicted the first. Mia and Jess had always been patient with Sarah's dramatic moods, but even they began asking her to take a break from social media and speak to someone who could help.
I knew this mostly from the people who insisted on keeping me informed. I did not celebrate it, and I did not pretend her behavior came as a surprise. She had been able to turn minor disagreements into emergencies long before we broke up. The difference was that I had usually been the person standing at the center of the emergency trying to make the room quiet again.
At the same time, I was learning that peace was not the same as happiness. Some evenings I sat at the kitchen table and missed her so sharply that I had to put down whatever I was holding. I would hear a song we used to play on road trips or smell perfume on a passing stranger and find myself remembering her laugh from the year we met. In those moments I did not feel free or wise; I felt like a man who had lost someone, even if losing her was necessary.
I called my brother on one of those evenings. He asked whether I was planning to go back, and I told him I was not, but that I missed her anyway. "Of course you do," he said. "You spent four years loving her. Missing somebody isn't an instruction. It's just a feeling."
I wrote that sentence in my journal. It helped me distinguish a memory from a plan, which was a distinction I had not known I needed. I could remember the way Sarah held my hand at my father's funeral without deciding she should hold it again. I could wish her well without agreeing to return to the life we had made.
By the third week, Sarah's job was in trouble. I heard that she had missed shifts, arrived late several times, and had a confrontation with a customer that led to a formal warning. Later, Jess told me that Sarah had broken down crying in a staff room and been sent home. I could only imagine how frightening it was for her to watch the consequences accumulate, but I also knew that none of it was something a conversation with me could fix.
She lost the position near the end of that month. The employer described it as performance-related, and I had no reason to think the description was false. I did not know whether she had been fired outright or offered a chance to resign; different people told the story differently. What I did know was that the apartment Sarah and I had once divided between two incomes was more than she could afford comfortably on her own.