I stand in the middle of my apartment and try to remember how to exist without someone checking on me.
The evening stretches long and quiet.
I make dinner and eat it like it’s a chore. Try to do data entry and immediately start typingSaul Saul Saulinto the spreadsheet like a summoning circle.
I watch TV but nothing sticks.
Eventually, I start touching everything like a widow in a war movie. His gifts. His presence. The goddamn succulent that’s now emotionally complicit in my collapse.
The blackout curtains. The good coffee. And on the couch, where he set them on day two: the pillows.
Not beige.
That’s what I notice first. Everything else in this apartment is beige or tan or cream or some other shade of giving up. But these pillows are soft blue, like faded denim, like his eyes.
I don’t know if he did that on purpose. Don’t know if he stood in a store somewhere and chose this color because it meant something or if it’s just coincidence.
Either way I grab a pillow like it’s a flotation device and I’m drowning in loneliness. Which I am.
Which is fine. Everything’s fine.
I’m just spooning a goddamn pillow and pretending it’s a man who installed my security system and made me feel real.
I sink onto the couch, pillow clutched against me.
Two weeks.
I can survive two weeks.
I survived the restaurant and the trial and the haircut and the name change and saying goodbye to everything I’ve ever known.
I can survive fourteen days of silence.
I press my face into the soft blue fabric and breathe.
It doesn’t smell like him. It smells like factory plastic and heartbreak.
But it’s his color. That stupid tender blue.
I cling to it like it’s going to whisper“You’re doing so good, sweetheart,”in his voice if I squeeze it hard enough.
Chapter Ten
STEVIE
Day twenty-eight, I see his face on the news.
Not in person. On my laptop. Because I’m Beth Taylor now and Beth Taylor spends her evenings doing responsible things like checking local news instead of stress-baking at 2 AM or masturbating to memories of three different men.
Marchetti Case Dismissed Due to Evidence Handling Error
The headline loads and my brain immediately files a missing persons report for my remaining sanity.
There’s a photo. Dario outside the courthouse. Flanked by lawyers. Wearing a charcoal gray suit that probably costs more than my car. Looking calm and composed and completely unruffled by the minor inconvenience of almost going to prison.
Free.
He walked.
