"I bought the air fryer," I said. "You can take your personal things. If there's anything else you believe is yours, make a list and we'll sort it out."
She rolled her eyes. "Unbelievable."
By the time she left, the house looked as though someone had hurriedly evacuated it. Drawers stood open, hangers lay across the bedroom floor, and her favorite ceramic mug remained on the kitchen counter. She stopped in the doorway, the ring catching the porch light again. "You're going to regret losing me," she said.
I almost answered with something cruel. Instead, I said, "I hope you find a place to stay tonight. We can arrange the rest of your belongings tomorrow."
The officers waited until her rideshare pulled away. Ramirez handed me the report number and advised me to speak with an attorney before changing access arrangements or taking any additional action. After that, the house was quiet enough that I could hear the refrigerator motor cycle on. I sat on the couch until after midnight, looking at the indentation her overnight bag had left on the carpet, and understood that the hardest part might not be getting her to leave. It might be learning to live in a house where I no longer had to anticipate her next mood.
I didn't sleep well. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the candles reflected in the stone on Landon's ring. Around three, I got up and put the tiramisu in the trash. Then I took it back out, because throwing away unopened food in the middle of the night wasn't going to fix anything. I put it in the refrigerator again and laughed once, quietly, at myself. Apparently, heartbreak could make a man reconsider dessert.
At seven thirty the next morning, my phone began vibrating against the nightstand as though it had developed a mechanical problem. There were missed calls from Minerva, messages from numbers I didn't recognize, and a text from my sister asking whether I was alive. I stared at the screen without opening anything for a minute. I had gone to bed expecting silence and woken up inside somebody else's emergency.
The first message from Minerva said, "You can't just throw someone out because your ego is hurt. I'm talking to a lawyer." The second claimed I had terrorized her with police. The third demanded I let her back inside to retrieve things she had supposedly been denied. Six minutes later, her mother wrote to ask why I had made her daughter homeless, and ten minutes after that, Landon sent a message that began, "Hey, man, not cool. You could've handled this privately."