The gym became a place where I could work through nervous energy without explaining it. I went in the mornings before work, lifted weights, and left with the agreeable exhaustion of having done something concrete. My appetite returned gradually, along with the ability to enjoy an evening without checking whether Emily had tried to reach me. I was still grieving, but the grief no longer occupied every available space.
On the morning I handed over the apartment, Ben arrived with a small suitcase and a backpack of books. He walked through the rooms with the property manager, checked that the keys worked, and signed the final papers. I showed him the stubborn kitchen drawer that had to be lifted slightly to close and the trick for adjusting the old radiator. He thanked me and wished me luck in the Netherlands, then asked whether I knew a nearby place for decent coffee.
I recommended the corner cafe and told him the owner made the best cinnamon rolls on the street. We shook hands beside the doorway where Emily and I had once kissed goodbye before work hundreds of times. I carried my final overnight bag downstairs and left the building feeling as if I'd stepped out of a photograph. There was no dramatic music, no thunderstorm, no witness applauding my decision, only a familiar sidewalk and a cab waiting at the curb.
I spent that night at a hotel near the airport. My room smelled faintly of laundry detergent, the television offered nothing interesting, and planes traced blinking lines across the darkness outside. I called my parents, checked my documents, and sent Daniel a photograph of my packed suitcases. For the first time in nearly four years, there was no shared schedule to negotiate and no one else's mood to account for before I chose what to do next.
I later learned that Emily went to the apartment the following afternoon. She hadn't told me she was coming, and she'd apparently assumed the stories about my move were either exaggerated or designed to make her chase me. When Ben opened the door, she asked whether Alex was home, using the tone of someone who expected to be invited in. He explained that he'd just moved in and didn't know where the former tenant had gone beyond the fact that he was relocating abroad.
According to Daniel, who heard about it from a mutual friend, she stood in the hallway for a long moment and asked whether Ben was joking. He showed her the name on his rental paperwork only long enough to confirm that he lived there, then politely asked her not to block the stairwell. She eventually left and began calling people who might know how to reach me. The image of her facing an unfamiliar tenant in the space she'd assumed would always be available stayed with me, though I never asked Ben to become involved in our history.