Priya knew by then that I'd moved. One afternoon she brought two coffees into the small conference room where I was working and asked how the new place felt. I told her the kitchen was too narrow, the heating made odd noises, and the train whistle sounded like a bird with a mechanical problem. She laughed and said that meant I'd started treating it like home. I found myself laughing with her, and for a while we discussed the best cheap furniture stores without touching the reasons I'd needed any of them.
I began running in the mornings, partly because I'd always said I wanted to be healthier and partly because the hours before work were the hardest. The first time I made it around the neighborhood, my lungs burned and I had to stop twice beside a row of parked cars. By the third week I could follow a longer route along the river without feeling as though the pavement were moving beneath me. The run gave the anxious thoughts somewhere to go, though it didn't magically remove them. Some mornings I still returned with Chloe's voice in my head, but it was no longer the only voice there.
Three weeks after leaving, I came back from one of those runs to find an unknown number calling. I answered while I was toweling sweat from my face, assuming it might be about a delivery or the lease amendment. "Alex? Oh my God, you answered," a woman said, and I recognized Lisa's exaggerated whisper before she introduced herself. Lisa had known Chloe through the same circle as Jess and Sarah, though I never fully understood the shifting alliances between them. She had a way of turning other people's crises into stories she could tell with an air of privileged concern.
"Lisa," I said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen counter. She began by telling me how worried she was about Chloe, then moved quickly to how worried she was about us. I told her there was no us, but she pressed on as if she hadn't heard me. Chloe was apparently a mess, couldn't sleep, wasn't doing well at work, and had been telling anyone who would listen that she wanted me back. I asked whether Chloe was safe, because despite everything I didn't want her harmed, and Lisa said she was staying with people who knew what was happening. Then she returned to her real purpose: persuading me to take responsibility for fixing it.
The story Lisa told about Mark was unpleasant, though I understood that I was hearing a secondhand account from someone who enjoyed delivering bad news. According to her, Chloe and Mark had become involved, and he had disappeared after getting what he wanted from the arrangement. Lisa said Chloe had gone to his place and found another woman answering the door. I didn't know whether all those details were accurate, and I didn't ask Lisa to provide proof. My relationship with Chloe had ended before any of it was supposed to have happened, and I refused to turn a rumor about her private life into another reason to congratulate myself.