I broke up with a man who had never betrayed me because I wanted to see whether he would beg me to stay.
I said the words deliberately, after practicing them in a mirror, and watched his face for the dramatic reaction I believed love was supposed to produce.
Donovan looked me in the eyes, breathed out once, and said, "Okay." Then he stood up as though the decision I had announced deserved to be taken seriously.
I had imagined tears, questions, apologies for offenses he had never committed, and a desperate promise that he would do anything to keep me. I had imagined being able to interrupt that performance with an affectionate confession, laughing through our relief as I explained that I had only wanted reassurance. Instead, I heard the quiet scrape of his chair against my apartment floor. I saw the man I loved preparing to leave because I had told him to.
What I did not know was that he had come carrying a small brass key. There was a plain paper tag tied to it with blue string, and before he walked out, he placed the key beside my untouched glass of water. The words on that tag would make my little experiment look even crueler than it already was. To understand why, I have to tell you what Donovan and I had been before I decided a steady kind of love was insufficient evidence of love at all.
My name is Samantha Ellis. I was twenty-six that September, living in a second-floor apartment in Dayton, Ohio, with a temperamental radiator, three thriving houseplants, and a kitchen cabinet that would have fallen off its hinge if Donovan had not repaired it. I worked in digital marketing for a regional home-goods company called Everwell Home. I spent my days studying which images made strangers pause, which headlines made them anxious enough to click, and which thirty-second videos persuaded them that something ordinary in their lives needed replacing. I was good at the work, and perhaps that should have warned me how easily I could become one of its customers.
Donovan Hayes was twenty-nine and worked in building maintenance at a children's hospital across town. His job was not glamorous, although he was proud of it in a quiet way that did not require other people to be impressed. A ventilation problem in an operating wing mattered more to him than an expensive lunch, and he could describe the relief of getting a critical system running again without making himself the hero of the story. He drove a six-year-old silver pickup, kept a flashlight and first-aid kit under the back seat, and remembered details most people forgot within minutes of hearing them.
His mother, Lorraine, was a retired elementary-school librarian who collected recipes on index cards. His father, Arthur, had worked as an electrician for thirty-eight years and believed a pie should be cut into generous pieces unless company was expected, in which case the pieces should be even more generous. Donovan's