David was looking at me now with a new expression, a careful, calculating one, the look of a man who has just felt the room turn against him and is trying to figure out how to turn it back. Sarah, he said. Come on.
I stood up from the table. And Baxter, feeling me move, stood up too, and pressed himself against my leg.
I’m staying with my sister for now, I said.
His face went slack. You’re leaving?
Yes.
Over this?
I looked at him, at the man I had loved and defended and made excuses for across a decade of my one and only life. I didn’t answer the question, because the question itself, over this, contained everything I finally understood about him. As if ten years of being lied to were a small thing. As if my whole life were a this.
Elaine shut the ring box with a small final snap. She is leaving, Elaine said, because you lied for years, David. To me. To your sister. To this whole family. And to her.
I went to the door and got my overnight bag, which I had packed badly in the dark hours before, with mismatched socks and no phone charger and a single earring I would find days later at the bottom. I bent down and clipped Baxter’s leash to his collar, and David watched me do it with something like disbelief.
You’re taking him too, he said.
He was mine before we moved in together, I said. You know that.
Sarah, he said, and he followed me toward the door, his voice climbing now into something almost pleading. Don’t do this like it’s final.
I stopped at the door and I turned back and I looked at him one last time, this man in his sweatpants in the gray morning light, in the kitchen of the house with the blue shutters we had painted together, laughing, a hundred years ago.
You made sure this was final, I said, long before tonight.
And I left.
I stayed at my sister’s for six days. I slept badly on her guest bed, waking at strange hours with my heart pounding and taking a moment each time to remember why I was there. I cried exactly once during those six days, and it was not for any of the big reasons. It was in her laundry room, folding the clothes I had thrown into the bag, when I found one of David’s socks tangled up in mine, mixed in by the machine and by ten years of two lives washed together, and something about the sheer smallness of it undid me. It felt obscene that something so trivial, one gray sock, could still have a claim on my life. I sat down on the floor of my sister’s laundry room and cried, and then I stopped, and I threw the sock away, and I went back to folding.
