When Madison stood in the middle of my living room and said, “I’m leaving,” I thought she meant she was going home. Ten minutes later, I was sitting on my couch with my chest burning, watching the woman I loved calmly arrange a ride while refusing to tell me why our relationship had apparently just ended. Then she smiled, said she had changed her mind, and taught me that sometimes the cruelest joke is the one that shows you exactly who a person can become.
Chapter 2
For the next week, I lived in the space between missing Madison and being afraid of her.
Every morning I woke after two or three broken hours of sleep and reached automatically for my phone. I would remember before I touched it that there would be no good-morning message, no photograph of her coffee, no complaint about traffic on Interstate 270. Then relief and grief would arrive together, two emotions that had no business sharing the same room.
Madison texted twice the first day and once the second. She apologized, said she had never intended to hurt me, and asked me not to make a permanent decision while we were both emotional. I answered only to arrange an exchange of belongings.
On the sixth day, she sent another message.
Have we had enough time to think? I deserve some closure too. If you really don’t want to talk, then I guess we go our separate ways.
The phrase irritated me. We go our separate ways sounded as if we had mutually drifted apart after years of incompatibility, not as if she had manufactured the end of our relationship for the experience of watching it happen.
Still, I called her.
“My trust is gone,” I told her.
“I said I was sorry.”
“I know.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
That was the question I couldn’t answer. I did not want revenge. I did not want her humiliated or punished. I wanted to return to the Thursday before that night, when love had still seemed like a safe place.
I gathered her sweaters, a pair of running shoes, toiletries from my bathroom, and a paperback she had been reading. Halfway through folding one of her shirts, I started crying so hard that I had to sit on the bedroom floor.
I called two friends. Neither answered.
Then I called my brother, Caleb. His phone went to voicemail too.
For a few minutes, I considered canceling the meeting. Instead I washed my face, carried Madison’s things downstairs, and drove to the shopping center where we had agreed to meet.
She was already there.
Madison stepped out of her car with a canvas bag containing my clothes and a few things I had left at her apartment. Her eyes were swollen, but she didn’t say hello. She pushed the bag toward me, took hers, and immediately turned away.
I watched her walk ten yards before I called her name.
She stopped.
“Did you want to talk or not?”
Madison turned back slowly. “I didn’t know if you did.”
“You’re the one who asked.”
“I know.” She wiped at her face. “That was rude. I’m sorry.”
She climbed into the passenger seat of my car, and for a while we simply sat there. Shoppers rolled carts toward minivans. A father lifted a toddler into a car seat. Somewhere across the parking lot, somebody laughed.
Ordinary life continued with offensive confidence.
Madison broke first.
“Is there any chance?” she asked. “Any chance at all?”
I looked through the windshield because looking at her hurt too much.
She began crying. “I talked to Melissa and my brother. They both said I deserved this.”
I turned toward her. “Why would they say that?”
“Because I’ve done things like this to them.”
The words landed quietly.
“What things?”
She twisted a tissue between her fingers. “Threatened to leave. Stopped talking to them. Told Melissa we were done being friends once because I wanted to see if she’d fight for me.”
I stared at her.
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked. “I do now.”
She reminded me of our six months together. Christmas lights downtown. Sunday breakfasts. The stupid plant we had bought and somehow kept alive. The afternoon she sat with Uncle Ray while I ran to the pharmacy because he had been too sick to be alone.
“Does none of that mean anything?” she asked.
“It means everything.”
“Then why can’t we fix this?”
Because I love you, I thought.
That was precisely the problem.
“If I take you back tonight,” I said, “what do you learn?”
“That I hurt you.”
“No. You learn that you can hurt me like this and I’ll stay.”
Her face tightened. “You really think I’d do it again?”
I said nothing.
Madison lowered her eyes. “Okay. I guess I don’t have much ground to stand on there.”
We cried together in that parked car like two people attending the funeral of someone we had both known intimately. Neither of us hated the other. In some ways, that made everything worse.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispered.
“I believe you.”
She looked almost hopeful.
“But you did.”
Her hope vanished.
I told her there might be a version of the future in which she learned why she tested people she loved and stopped doing it. Maybe counseling would help. Maybe time would. Maybe losing me would finally make the pattern real enough that she could no longer dismiss it as impulsiveness.
“But I can’t stay around while you learn,” I said.
Madison covered her face.
I almost reached for her.
Then a memory rose in me with such force that my fingers froze halfway between us.
My mother standing in a kitchen doorway.
My mother smiling after telling my father she had thrown his clothes into the yard.
My mother waiting to see whether he would beg.
Madison’s nervous little smile from the breakup came back to me, and suddenly I understood why it had frightened me so much.
I was not only sitting in a car with the woman I loved.
I was sitting with every unpredictable person I had ever learned to survive.
