"Do you ever imagine us living together?" I asked. "All the time," he answered. He told me he had been paying attention to rental listings near both our workplaces, not because he wanted to pressure me but because I had said I needed a second room for work and he needed somewhere quiet enough to sleep after emergency shifts. He mentioned a brick duplex on Birch Street with a blue front door and an upstairs apartment with yellow kitchen walls. I remembered passing it on a walk months earlier and saying I would love to cook in a kitchen with that much morning light.
"The yellow kitchen," I said, smiling. Donovan looked pleased that I remembered. "Maybe," he said. "If it becomes available and if the numbers work, we could look at it. I'm not making a decision for both of us." I told him I wanted that. I meant it, at least for the length of the conversation. By the time we drove home, however, I was studying photographs from a celebrity engagement party and wondering why my relationship did not have a similarly undeniable moment.
There was one particular video I watched repeatedly during the following weeks. A woman told her boyfriend that she wanted to break up, then filmed him crying in the parking lot outside her building. In the last clip, he stood in the rain holding flowers and begged her to reconsider. The woman captioned it with a sentence about knowing your worth, and the comments were full of congratulations. I never saw anything about his consent to being filmed or how the two of them resolved their original problem. I saw only the flood of approval for a man who had refused to go quietly.
When Kendra caught me watching it, she asked why I found it romantic. I told her the woman had gotten proof that her boyfriend cared. Kendra frowned. "She told him to leave, and he didn't. That's proof he heard her and decided his own feelings mattered more than her answer." I rolled my eyes and accused Kendra of being cynical. She looked hurt but did not argue, and afterward I avoided discussing Donovan with her for a while.
In the weeks leading to the breakup, I began thinking about the idea as though it were a scientific experiment. I told myself I would not be doing anything cruel because I would explain it quickly. I would tell Donovan the truth as soon as he reacted the way I wanted. The contradiction should have been obvious: I was planning to inflict uncertainty on someone who had worked hard to make me feel secure, and calling it a way to discover security. But I had grown practiced at translating my impulses into language that made them sound reasonable.
The weekend before that Tuesday was ordinary in the best sense, although I did not appreciate it until afterward. Donovan came over on Saturday afternoon with groceries because he knew I had worked late. We made pasta, burned the garlic slightly, and ended up ordering takeout because neither of us