My father liked her when he met her. He had a quiet laugh and a habit of making coffee for everyone who walked into his house, and Sarah could talk to him about almost anything. After she left that first Sunday, he stood beside me at the sink drying a plate and said she seemed full of life. Then he added something I did not pay enough attention to: "Make sure there's room for yours in there too."
He died less than a year later. It was sudden, the kind of telephone call that divides an ordinary afternoon into a before and an after, and for weeks I moved through the world as though I were walking under deep water. Sarah came to the funeral, sat beside me through every awkward conversation, and held my hand so tightly that my fingers hurt. She was there when I was incapable of finding words for anything, and I built a great deal of what I believed about our relationship on that one faithful fact.
That is part of what made leaving her so difficult. I did not spend four years loving a monster, and I cannot make the story simpler by pretending I did. There were good mornings and small acts of tenderness and memories that were genuinely ours. There was a woman who once drove an hour in heavy rain because I had told her I could not stand being alone in my father's empty house, and there was also the woman who would eventually laugh while telling me she was going out with someone more exciting. Both women were Sarah, and for a long time I insisted only the first one was real.
After college, we rented an apartment near my job. It had thin walls, uneven kitchen cabinets, and a bedroom window that overlooked the back of a grocery store, but the rent was manageable and there was space for the secondhand dining table we bought together. Sarah painted the kitchen a warm cream color while I assembled shelves that came with instructions written as though they had been translated from three other languages. We ate takeout on the floor that first night and promised each other we would remember it when we had something better.
For a while we kept those promises in the ordinary ways people do. I took the trash out on Thursday because she always forgot the collection schedule, and she remembered which days I had meetings that made me anxious. We divided bills unevenly but with the intention of balancing them when her career settled. We talked about trips we could not yet afford and furniture we could buy after another raise, and I thought the fact that we could plan together meant we were still moving in the same direction.