Two months after she left, I realized I'd slept through an entire weekend night without dreaming about her or waking to check my phone. It should have been an unremarkable morning. Instead I stood by the kitchen window holding a cup of coffee and recognized something new: I hadn't been thinking about how to get her back, or how to make her regret leaving. I'd been thinking about which trail I wanted to run before breakfast. For the first time, the next part of my life seemed more interesting than the last.
I didn't know then that the story in Vegas was already beginning to unravel. I wasn't following her posts, and I hadn't asked anyone to keep me informed. All I knew was that, somewhere far away, the woman who'd left me for a stranger was continuing with the future she'd chosen. I assumed I'd eventually hear she was happy, or that she'd moved on again, and I'd learn to live with the information. What reached me instead was a message from Mike, three months after she boarded that second plane, asking whether I knew what had happened to her. Mike's text arrived on a Wednesday just as I was heading out for lunch.
"Hey, man. Heard about Zoe. Are you okay?" I stopped in the office hallway and read it twice. We'd talked about her plenty during the breakup, but not recently, and his wording made me wonder whether something had happened back home. I called him from a bench outside the building, where delivery trucks were idling along the curb.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You really haven't heard anything?"
"I haven't checked her accounts. I thought you knew that."
"Yeah. I just didn't realize how completely you'd cut it off."
He explained that Zoe had quit her marketing job not long after moving to Vegas and had started presenting herself online as a new resident of the city. He'd heard about the resignation from another college friend who knew someone at the agency, so I took that part as secondhand information. The social media posts, he said, were easier to verify. She'd been photographed with Jake at restaurants, shows, and parties, writing about how she'd finally chosen a life of adventure.
I didn't ask to see the photographs. It wasn't that I didn't care. I cared in the tired, leftover way you care about a place where something terrible happened after you've moved away. But I no longer wanted to stand in front of the window and look inside. I asked Mike whether there was a reason he had contacted me now, rather than just telling me she seemed happy.
"Because it doesn't look happy anymore," he said.
He'd been contacted by one of Zoe's former coworkers, who said she'd asked several people whether they knew anything about a man named Jake who operated a small event business in Nevada. The questions were vague at first. Then someone learned she'd been trying to recover money she'd transferred into an account linked to his supposed business. Her posts had gone quiet. Sarah had stopped responding to questions about the trip. Something had happened, though Mike wasn't yet sure of the full details.