The pool cue was still warm from his grip.

That was the detail Rashad remembered later — the way the cue felt in his hand when he set it down on the edge of the table and said, quietly, so nobody across the room could hear:

“Bro. I need you to be the villain tonight.”

Marcus looked up from the rack.

He’d known Rashad since eighth grade, which meant he’d seen this particular expression before — that low-lit focus that showed up whenever Rashad spotted something worth pursuing.

He followed Rashad’s eyes across the pool hall.

Across the blue haze of the overhead lights.

Across two tables, a waitress carrying a tray of drinks, and a cluster of people near the bar.

To a girl standing near the jukebox, wearing a yellow jacket, scrolling through song selections with one finger like she hadn’t already decided what she was going to pick.

Marcus looked back at Rashad.

“Batman?” he said.

“Batman,” Rashad confirmed.

Marcus cracked his knuckles.

“You already know what it is,” he said.

The Batman, as Rashad had developed it over several years of field testing, was not a complicated play.

It was elegant in its simplicity, which was what made it work.

The concept: you needed two people, one clear role each.

Your boy went in first as the villain — loud, aggressive, the exact kind of man that a woman in a yellow jacket standing near a jukebox in a pool hall in Columbus, Ohio, did not want talking to her.

You waited.

You gave it sixty seconds — long enough for the situation to turn uncomfortable, short enough that you were still rescuing her from something real.

Then you walked over in your metaphorical white armor.

You told the villain to back up.

You made sure she knew you were on her side.

You let the gratitude do the rest of the work.

It was manipulation, technically.

Rashad understood that.

He also understood that if he thought about it too hard, it stopped working, so he had learned not to think about it too hard.

Marcus was already walking across the room.

—

She had not wanted to be at the pool hall that night.

Her name was Hannah, and she had come with two friends who had immediately absorbed themselves into a game of darts on the far side of the room, leaving her standing near the jukebox with her drink and the vague feeling that she should have stayed home and finished her massage therapy coursework instead.

She was deep into the semester.

April was the finish line — she’d written it on a sticky note above her desk at home, circled it in red marker, counted down to it with the particular focus of someone who has paid for something real with real time and real money and intends to collect.

She had plans.

She had a plan that had a timeline and a destination and a name on a lease that she and Rashad had talked about putting together once she graduated.

Las Vegas.

A new city.

A new start.

Massage therapy licenses transferred.

Rashad had said yes.

He had said yes in the specific way that people say yes when they mean it — not the agreeable-but-vague yes, not the we’ll-see-how-things-go yes, but the actual concrete yes that came with discussions about neighborhoods and moving timelines and what month made the most financial sense to give notice on the Columbus apartment.

May was the word they’d settled on.

May, after her April graduation, a few weeks to breathe, then Vegas.

She’d told her parents.

She’d done the research on cost of living.

She was at the pool hall on a Thursday night because her friends had insisted she needed to stop sitting at her desk with the massage therapy textbook and exist in the world for a few hours.

She was standing near the jukebox, thinking about whether “No Scrubs” by TLC was appropriate for the vibe of the room, when a man walked up beside her and said something so straightforwardly offensive that she actually laughed at the audacity of it.

—

Marcus had, Rashad acknowledged afterward, gone extremely hard on the villain role.

He had said things that Rashad had not scripted.

He had been, in the technical sense of the word, committed to the bit.

Hannah had hated it.

She had said so — clearly, directly, in the exact tone of voice that communicates not interest but its precise opposite.

And then Rashad had appeared.

He had said, “Back up. She already told you. Keep it moving.”

He had said it like he meant it, because he did mean it — that was the part of the Batman that always surprised even him, the fact that the performance of chivalry produced the actual feeling of chivalry.

He had put himself between Hannah and Marcus.

He had turned to her with something that was three parts manufactured calm and one part genuine concern for whether she was okay.

She had looked at him.

She had looked at him for about four seconds longer than people look at strangers.

She said: “Thank you.”

He said: “Of course.”

Marcus went back to the pool table.

Rashad stayed.

—

They talked for two hours.

That part was not the Batman.

That part was just two people in a pool hall in Columbus, Ohio, finding out that they were interesting to each other.

She told him about massage therapy school.

He told her about his job — the cargo van, the twelve-hour days, the way the city looked from the back of the vehicle when you were moving through it at seven in the morning before anyone else was really awake.

She laughed at something he said about his coworker’s lunch habits.

He asked her a question about what massage therapy actually involved, expecting a short answer, and got a ten-minute explanation about fascia and pressure points and the difference between Swedish and deep tissue that he did not fully understand but found, to his surprise, completely engaging.

They were not playing a game anymore.

Both of them had stopped playing games, in the specific way that happens when a conversation becomes real before either person notices it happening.

He got her number.

She gave it willingly.

She did not know about the Batman.

—

He called her two days later.

Not a text — a call.

She noticed that.

She noticed it because in her experience men who intended to be serious called, and men who were calculating their options texted until they’d made up their mind.

She picked up on the second ring.

They talked for forty-five minutes.

About nothing consequential.

About everything consequential.

About the fact that she was planning to move to Las Vegas in May and what that felt like — the specific combination of excited and terrified that comes with deciding to leave a city you’ve lived in for your whole life for one you’ve only visited twice.

He said he’d been thinking about Vegas too.

She said: “Really?”

He said: “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Like, Columbus is cool, but it’s not — I don’t know. It’s not where I want to be forever.”

She said: “That’s exactly how I feel.”

—

The thing about Rashad was that he was not, in most respects, a bad man.

This is not a defense.

It is a complication, which is different.

He worked.

Twelve hours a day, most days — the cargo van rolling through Columbus before sunrise, the particular physical exhaustion of a day spent moving things from one place to another, the way your back registered every curb and every pothole before your brain did.

He came home tired.

He came home, collapsed on the couch, turned on the Xbox, and disappeared into whatever game he was currently working through.

This was where things started to go sideways.

Not in the leaving-for-Vegas sense.

In the smaller, daily, accumulated sense that is how most relationships actually break.

Hannah worked too.

She had class three nights a week and a part-time job and the textbook that lived on her desk with the sticky note above it that said APRIL in red marker.

She also managed the apartment.

The bills.

The coordination of who needed to be where and when.

She managed it the way someone manages something they didn’t sign up to manage alone — competently, exhaustedly, with an edge of resentment that kept getting sharper the more invisible the work felt.

When she came home and found Rashad on the Xbox, she felt that edge.

When she called him at work to ask a question about the rent and he answered sounding annoyed, she felt it more.

When she asked him, for the third time in a month, if he’d looked into what moving companies charged for Columbus to Las Vegas, and he said “yeah I’m looking into it” in a voice that communicated he had not looked into it at all —

She said things she probably shouldn’t have said.

She said them in the tone she probably shouldn’t have used.

And Rashad, tired from twelve hours in a cargo van and defensive in the particular way that comes from feeling like nothing you do is ever enough, said nothing back.

Which felt, to Hannah, like the loudest possible response.

—

The accusations started small.

A “who was that?” when his phone lit up at dinner.

A “why’d it take you so long to answer?” when she called during his shift.

A FaceTime at 2 PM on a Tuesday when he was, in fact, in the back of the cargo van eating a sandwich, which he held up to the camera — the sandwich, the van, the trash bags stacked against the wall — as evidence of his precise location.

She didn’t fully believe him.

Or she believed him but couldn’t stop the part of her brain that kept generating scenarios.

This is what trust issues do.

They are not irrational, exactly — they usually come from somewhere real, from something that happened before, from a lesson learned at cost in some previous situation.

But they apply the logic of the past to the present, which means they are almost always slightly wrong about the specific person in front of them even when they are completely right about the general pattern.

Hannah had been cheated on before.

Not by Rashad.

By someone before Rashad, someone she didn’t talk about much, who had spent six months convincing her she was paranoid and three months proving she hadn’t been paranoid at all.

That history didn’t disappear when she met Rashad.

It came with her.

It sat in the passenger seat when she drove to his apartment.

It showed up when his phone lit up at dinner.

It asked questions she wasn’t always proud of asking.

And Rashad, who had a temper and a pride and a specific way of responding to being questioned that involved going very quiet and very cold —

Went very quiet.

And very cold.

—

The Vegas conversation happened in November.

Not the hopeful version — the clarifying one.

They’d been arguing about something else, something small that neither of them would remember in six months, and somehow the argument had tilted and she’d said:

“You haven’t done anything about the move.”

He’d said: “I’ve been working twelve-hour days, Hannah.”

She’d said: “So have I. I’m also in school. I’ve been looking up apartments online, I’ve been researching neighborhoods, I’ve been — you haven’t done anything.”

He’d said: “I said I’d look into it.”

She’d said: “You’ve been saying that for two months.”

He’d said: “So maybe I need more time.”

She’d looked at him.

Not with anger, exactly.

With the specific look of someone updating their understanding of a situation they thought they’d already understood.

She said: “Do you actually want to go to Vegas?”

He said: “Yeah.”

She said: “Do you want to go with me?”

He didn’t answer right away.

That pause.

That specific, four-second pause between the question and whatever came after it — that pause was where things changed.

Not immediately.

Not in any way that either of them named out loud that night.

But something shifted in that pause, and both of them felt it, and neither of them knew what to do with it, so they did what people do: they kept going.

—

Her name was Destiny, and she worked at a Starbucks on the north side of Columbus.

She had known Rashad for three months — three months that she counted carefully, because she was a person who believed that time mattered, that three months was not nothing, that things built over ninety days had weight.

She had met him when he came in for a coffee order so complicated that she’d had to ask him to repeat it twice, and he’d laughed at himself while doing it, which was the specific detail that made her look up from the cup.

They had talked.

They had continued talking, in the way of people who find a reason to keep the conversation going past the point where the transaction is complete.

He came back the next week.

And the week after that.

By the third week they had exchanged numbers, and by the third month she had developed the particular kind of feeling that makes you think about someone in the middle of doing other things.

What she did not know — what Rashad had carefully not told her — was that there was a Hannah.

There was a Hannah and a shared apartment and a conversation about May and a sticky note above a desk that said APRIL in red marker.

What she did know was that he was funny, and he worked hard, and he looked at her like he was paying attention.

She had decided that was enough to go on.

For three months, she had decided that was enough.

—

Rashad, for his part, had told himself a story.

The story went: Hannah and I are basically done.

The story went: we’ve been falling apart for months and everyone can see it.

The story went: what I have with Destiny is something real, and I’m not going to find that with someone who treats me like I can’t be trusted to walk to the mailbox without a FaceTime check-in.

The story was not entirely wrong.

That’s the thing about the stories we tell ourselves — they usually contain enough truth to be defensible.

The part he was leaving out was the conversation about May.

The part he was leaving out was the sticky note.

The part he was leaving out was that Hannah had built something — a plan, a future, a specific imagined version of the next year — around an agreement that he had made and was now quietly deciding not to honor.

He was not going to tell her he’d changed his mind.

He was not going to sit down and say: I don’t want to go to Vegas with you, I don’t think this is working, I think we should end this before we waste any more of each other’s time.

He was going to go to Vegas.

Without her.

And he was going to let the fact of his leaving explain everything that his words hadn’t.

—

He told Marcus first.

This was how it usually went — Marcus was the person you told things to before you figured out how to tell anyone else.

They were at the pool hall again.

Different night, same table.

Rashad set down his cue and said: “I’m leaving for Vegas in the spring.”

Marcus said: “You and Hannah?”

“Just me.”

Marcus looked at him.

“You told her that?”

“Not yet.”

Marcus picked up his cue.

He lined up a shot.

He took the shot.

The solid ball went in clean.

He stood up and said: “You gonna have to tell her.”

Rashad said: “I know.”

“She’s planning her whole life around that move.”

“I know.”

“She’s going to be —”

“I know, Marcus.”

Marcus looked at him for a moment.

Then he said: “Remember how she never found out about the Batman?”

Rashad said: “Yeah.”

“She’s going to find out about this.”

—

The twelve-hour days continued.

The cargo van, the city before sunrise, the sandwiches in the back, the particular smell of a vehicle that moves things for a living.

He came home to the apartment — their apartment, the one with Hannah’s textbooks on the table and the sticky note visible from the kitchen if you looked at the right angle.

He played Xbox.

She studied.

They moved around each other in the specific way of people who are no longer quite touching but haven’t yet admitted the distance.

There were still good nights.

This is the part that makes everything harder — the good nights.

The nights when she’d close the textbook early and they’d watch something together, when she’d fall asleep on his shoulder on the couch, when he’d make her laugh about something that happened with the cargo van and she’d look at him with that expression that was pure, uncomplicated warmth.

He would think, on those nights: maybe it’s fine.

Maybe the distance is temporary.

Maybe Vegas in May was still possible in some form.

He would think this.

And then the next day she would FaceTime him at work with a voice that had suspicion in it and he would go cold and the distance would come back and it would be wider than it was before.

—

She found out the way people always find out.

Not from him.

Never from him.

From a woman she didn’t know named Destiny, who had assumed — reasonably, given three months of weekly Starbucks visits and exchanged numbers and something that felt like the beginning of something real — that she deserved to know what she’d actually gotten into.

Destiny had done her research.

Social media exists.

Mutual acquaintances exist.

The particular ecosystem of a medium-sized American city where everyone knows someone who knows someone exists.

She had found Hannah’s profile.

She had found the photos of Hannah and Rashad.

She had found the post from six months ago where Hannah had tagged Rashad in something about Vegas and excitement and new chapters.

She had sat with all of this for two days.

And then she had sent a message.

Not a long one.

Just: “I think we should talk. I know Rashad.”

Hannah read the message at 8:47 PM on a Wednesday, sitting at her desk with the massage therapy textbook open in front of her and the sticky note visible in her peripheral vision.

APRIL.

In red marker.

She read the message again.

She closed the textbook.

She typed back: “Tell me.”

—

She confronted him on a Thursday.

Not because Thursday was significant.

Because that was the first night he came home before ten.

She was sitting at the kitchen table when he walked in.

She had his phone — no, not his phone, she didn’t have his phone.

She had her own phone.

She had the message from Destiny on her own phone.

She put it on the table between them and said: “Who is she?”

He looked at the screen.

He looked at Hannah.

He said: “Let me explain.”

She said: “You promised me.”

Four words, same as always, but these four were different — not a question but a statement, flat and certain, the kind that doesn’t leave room for maneuvering.

You promised me.

He had.

He had promised her specifically — in the specific way that men promise things when they are afraid of what happens if they don’t — that he would not cheat on her.

He had promised her this because she had told him, early, about what happened before.

About the six months of convincing her she was paranoid.

She had made him say out loud that he would end it before he did something like that.

“You promised me,” she said, “that you would break up with me first.”

He said: “Hannah —”

She said: “You cheated on me.”

And what came after that was not quiet.

—

He said he was tired of how she treated him.

She said he acted like a child.

He said he worked twelve-hour days and came home to suspicion and Xbox criticism and a woman who FaceTimed him at 2 PM to verify his location.

She said he came home, sat in a chair, contributed nothing, and expected her to manage the apartment, the bills, the moving plans, the entire architecture of a future he had already secretly decided not to participate in.

He said she talked to him like he was nothing.

She said: “Maybe if you’d acted like something, I would have talked to you differently.”

That one landed.

He saw it land.

He also saw, because he wasn’t entirely without self-awareness, that she was not entirely wrong.

That the treatment and the behavior had been feeding each other — her suspicion producing his withdrawal, his withdrawal confirming her suspicion, the whole cycle grinding forward like something that had lost its lubrication months ago and was now running on friction alone.

He saw all of this.

He said none of it.

He said: “I’m going to Vegas. Without you.”

She stared at him.

She said: “You were going to leave without telling me.”

He didn’t answer.

“You were going to let me finish school in April and then just — leave.”

“I was going to tell you,” he said.

“When?”

He didn’t answer.

She said: “Get out of my house.”

—

He left.

He drove to Marcus’s.

He sat on Marcus’s couch and explained the whole thing and Marcus listened with the particular patience of a man who has heard versions of this story before and knows that his job right now is to listen, not to say what he thinks.

What Marcus thought, privately, was that Rashad had done a predictable thing in a predictable way and had now arrived at predictable consequences, and that none of this was surprising if you’d been paying attention.

What he said was: “You good?”

Rashad said: “Yeah.”

He said it in the way that meant no.

He sat on the couch for a long time.

He thought about the pool hall.

He thought about the yellow jacket and the jukebox and the Batman and the way Hannah had looked at him after Marcus walked away — the way she’d looked at him like he was worth looking at.

He thought about the forty-five-minute phone call.

He thought about Vegas.

He thought about a sticky note that said APRIL in red marker.

He thought about the fact that he had, at some point between the pool hall and the couch he was currently sitting on, taken something that was genuinely good and used it badly.

This was not a comfortable thought.

He sat with it anyway.

—

Hannah sat at her desk.

The textbook was still closed.

The sticky note was still there.

She looked at APRIL for a long time.

She thought about the yellow jacket she’d been wearing the night she met him — her lucky jacket, she called it, the one she wore when she needed things to go right.

She thought about the FaceTimes, the suspicion, the edge in her voice that she’d heard and hated and sometimes couldn’t stop.

She thought about whether she’d been wrong about Rashad or wrong about what she’d thought she was building with him.

She thought these were different questions with possibly different answers.

She opened the textbook.

April was still April.

Vegas was still Vegas.

She had a plan.

The plan did not require him.

She turned the page.

—

The morning after felt like every morning after.

Flatter.

Quieter.

The specific kind of silence that isn’t peaceful but is the absence of something that used to fill the room.

Rashad loaded the last of his things into the cargo van — not his work van, a rented one, a larger one — on a Saturday in late March.

He’d found an apartment in Las Vegas.

East side, not far from the Strip but not on it — the real city behind the neon, where people had mortgages and school pickups and grocery runs and all the ordinary machinery of actual life.

The apartment was smaller than he’d planned.

The cost of living was higher than Marcus had estimated when he’d helped run the numbers three months ago.

None of this was Hannah’s fault.

He’d done the research himself, alone, and the numbers were what they were.

He loaded the van.

The Columbus morning was cold and gray, the particular gray of a Midwestern March that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s going to concede to spring or dig in for one last week of winter.

He sat in the driver’s seat.

He thought about calling her.

He did not call her.

He put the van in drive.

—

The thing about going to Vegas when you’re from Columbus is that the city announces itself from thirty miles out.

You come over a ridge in the desert and there it is — the skyline rising out of nothing, a fever dream of light and architecture in the middle of a landscape that has no context for it whatsoever.

Rashad had seen it before.

He’d driven through once, years ago, on a road trip with Marcus.

But arriving with your things in the back of a rented cargo van is different from passing through.

Arriving means you’re staying.

It means you’ve decided something.

He drove in on the 15, the city growing in the windshield, and felt something he hadn’t expected.

Not excitement exactly.

Not relief.

Something more like exposure — the specific vulnerability of having made a large decision and now being on the other side of it, where the decision is no longer theoretical.

He’d wanted this.

He’d wanted out of Columbus, out of the apartment, out of the relationship that had curdled into something neither of them recognized.

He’d wanted new.

He had new.

The skyline got larger.

He drove toward it.

—

Hannah graduated in April.

On a Thursday, which was a detail that amused her because Thursday had been the night of the confrontation — the night she’d put her phone on the kitchen table and said four words that didn’t leave room for maneuvering.

She wore the cap and gown and stood with her cohort in the gymnasium of the school she’d been attending for two years and listened to a speech about the healing potential of human touch and thought about all the things she’d touched in the last several months and whether any of them had healed.

Her mother was in the audience.

Her two friends from the pool hall were in the audience.

A man named Derek who had been leaving notes in her textbook at school — not notes-notes, just small ones, “good luck on the final” and “you’ve got this” — was not in the audience because she hadn’t invited him.

She was thinking about it.

She was thinking about a lot of things.

But mostly she was thinking about the yellow jacket, which she had worn to graduation under the gown because she needed things to go right, and about the sticky note that she’d finally taken down from the wall above her desk the week before.

Not because April had come.

Because she’d needed the wall space for something else.

She was printing the rental listing for a studio apartment in Las Vegas and she needed somewhere to put it.

—

She was going to Vegas.

She had always been going to Vegas.

This was her plan.

The plan did not require him.

It had never required him, exactly — it had required a second person, and he had been the second person she’d chosen, and that choosing had turned out to be a miscalculation.

People make miscalculations.

You adjust.

You take the plan and you take out the parts that depended on someone who wasn’t going to show up and you keep the rest.

She’d talked to her licensing board.

She’d found a massage therapy practice in Henderson, Nevada — a suburb of Las Vegas, good reputation, a manager who had looked at her resume and said “we’d love to have you” in an email that she’d read three times.

She had a job.

She had an apartment.

She had her license and her cohort and the specific confidence of someone who has gotten through a hard year and is still standing with their plans more or less intact.

She had a yellow jacket that she’d decided was lucky regardless of where she’d last worn it and what had happened after.

—

Rashad got a job in Las Vegas detailing cars for a dealership on the west side.

It was not the twelve-hour-day kind of job.

It was eight hours, with a lunch break that he actually took, and coworkers who didn’t know anything about Columbus or the cargo van or a woman who’d built a plan around a conversation in November.

He was good at his work.

He always had been.

He rented his apartment, bought a secondhand couch, and was working through a backlog of games on his Xbox in a city where no one FaceTimed him to ask where he was.

The quiet was what he’d wanted.

The quiet was also, some evenings, a little too quiet.

He thought about the pool hall.

He thought about Marcus setting the rack and saying, “You already know what it is.”

He thought about the Batman — the play, the sixty-second window, the white shining armor — and about the fact that Hannah had never found out, had never known the moment she’d trusted him was a moment he’d engineered.

He didn’t know what he would have done with that information if she’d known.

He didn’t know if it would have changed anything.

He thought about a yellow jacket.

He thought about the specific expression on Hannah’s face when she said, flatly, without anger, “You promised me” — and the way that sentence had moved through him like something physical.

He thought about the fact that the story he’d told himself — we’re basically done, everyone can see it — had been true enough to act on but not honest enough to say out loud.

He thought about the difference between those two things for a long time.

—

There are relationships that end because something goes wrong.

And there are relationships that end because neither person could figure out how to make something go right.

Rashad and Hannah were the second kind.

This does not excuse the cheating.

This does not excuse the silence where honesty should have been.

It does not excuse the Batman, or the kept secret, or the four-second pause that said everything he couldn’t bring himself to say directly.

But it explains something — the way two people can both be telling the truth about what they’re experiencing and still be incompatible in a way that no amount of conversation fully fixes.

She needed him to be present.

He needed her to trust him.

She couldn’t trust until she saw him be present.

He couldn’t be present under the weight of suspicion.

The cycle ground forward.

Something broke.

—

The yellow jacket.

She’d worn it the night they met.

She’d worn it the night of the Batman, without knowing it was the Batman, without knowing the white armor was calculated.

She’d worn it to graduation.

She’d packed it in the third box from the right when she loaded the van — her van, the one she’d rented herself, paid for herself — for the drive to Nevada.

It was not a lucky jacket.

It was just a jacket.

But she’d decided a long time ago that the luck was never in the object.

The luck was in what you chose to do while you were wearing it.

She chose Las Vegas.

She chose the Henderson massage therapy practice.

She chose the studio apartment with the big east-facing window that filled the morning with desert light.

She chose herself.

—

In a coffee shop on the north side of Las Vegas — a different Starbucks from the one in Columbus, but similar in the way all Starbucks are similar — a woman named Destiny ordered a complicated drink and thought about fresh starts.

She was not in Las Vegas because of Rashad.

She was in Las Vegas because she had always wanted to be in Las Vegas, and the situation with Rashad had clarified, in the specific way that painful experiences sometimes clarify things, what she was and was not willing to wait around for.

She took her drink.

She found a table by the window.

The Nevada sun was doing something extraordinary to the street outside — the particular bright, flat, unambiguous light of the desert that has no patience for ambiguity.

She opened her laptop.

She had a plan.

The plan did not require anyone but her.

—

Marcus, back in Columbus, continued to play pool.

He won most nights.

He had the particular advantage of a man who knows how every play ends before it starts.

He thought about the Batman sometimes.

About how the play worked because the villain was bad enough and the hero arrived fast enough and the woman was willing to be grateful.

About how none of those conditions were stable.

About how eventually, in any game, you had to put the cue down and have an actual conversation.

He was still working on that part himself.

—

Rashad did not see Hannah in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is a city of over two million people, and the east side and Henderson are not the same address, and the world does not arrange coincidences on demand.

But he thought about the yellow jacket sometimes.

He thought about it when he was detailing a car in the dealership lot, when the Nevada sun was doing something to the chrome that reminded him of the pool hall lights and the way she’d looked near the jukebox before he’d run the play that had gotten him to her.

He thought about what he’d do differently.

He thought this was a good question to sit with for a while before he answered it.

—

The cargo van — the work one, his regular one, back in Columbus — had been reassigned.

The dealership had a different fleet.

No trash bags in the back.

No FaceTime calls from a woman verifying his location.

He was a man who worked eight hours and took a lunch break and drove home in the Nevada evening with the windows down.

He was thirty-one years old and he was starting over and starting over felt different when you’d chosen it than when you’d simply let things fall apart until there was nothing left to hold.

He was trying to figure out the difference.

Between choosing something and letting it happen to you.

Between the Batman and an actual conversation.

Between the story you tell yourself about a relationship being basically done and the moment you sit down and say, honestly, out loud, to the person involved: I think this is over, and here is why, and I’m sorry for the time I wasted pretending otherwise.

He had not done that.

He understood that now in a way he hadn’t when he was inside it.

He drove home with the windows down.

The desert evening smelled like heat and dust and whatever was blooming in the median.

He had a plan.

It was smaller than he’d originally imagined.

It was just his.

And it was, for now, enough.