I slept on the couch and told Zoe I'd stayed up working when she asked the next morning. I went to the office, stared at lines of code I understood perfectly, and couldn't make myself care about any of them. My manager asked if I was sick. I told him I hadn't slept well. He suggested I take the afternoon off, and for once I accepted help without a long explanation.
I drove to a park on the edge of town and sat in my car watching the wind move through the trees. I kept trying to imagine what I would do when I got home. Anger offered one kind of answer: I could shout, demand her phone, recount everything I'd paid for, make sure she knew how badly she'd hurt me. Fear offered another: I could ask what I needed to change, promise to become more adventurous, tell her we could still work it out. Neither answer felt like a person I wanted to become.
A little before sunset, I called my friend Mike. He'd known us both since college and was one of the few people who had seen our relationship when it was good. I didn't tell him the details of the messages. I said I'd found out Zoe was seeing someone else and didn't know whether to confront her immediately or wait until I could think clearly. Mike listened without making jokes or treating it as gossip.
"Are you safe to drive?" he asked first.
"Yeah. I'm parked."
"Then stay parked another ten minutes. You don't have to decide your entire future while you're shaking."
"I'm not shaking."
"Alex, I've known you for years. You say you're not shaking right before you start listing everything you're trying not to feel."
I laughed once, bitterly, because he was right. He told me he couldn't decide the relationship for me, but I deserved an honest conversation. Whatever I chose, he said, I needed to stop treating my feelings as an inconvenience someone else might resent. I thanked him and stayed in the parked car until the light changed from gold to gray.
That evening I asked Zoe if we could talk the next day when neither of us had somewhere to be. She looked up from her laptop and asked what about. I said Vegas. Her face changed so quickly that I knew she understood before I explained. Then she recovered, shrugged, and said fine.
I spent most of the night awake. I wrote down what I knew, what I needed to ask, and what I would not agree to. I didn't want to call her names. I didn't want to threaten her or ask for permission to be hurt. I wanted her to tell me the truth, even if the truth meant the four years I remembered weren't the four years she'd been experiencing.
The next afternoon, we sat in the living room where we'd once assembled cheap furniture and laughed at the instructions. Zoe had her laptop on her knees. I had mine open to a blank document because I couldn't bear to look as though I was waiting for a verdict. The silence stretched. Eventually I said her name.
"Zoe, we need to talk about Vegas."
She closed the laptop carefully. "What about it?"