TOBIAS LEFT TEN DAYS LATER. He moved out and into a beat-up Prius he had bought with a cash advance and drove out to California with three boxes of things I helped him pack. I even labeled them. Clothes. Odds and Ends. Art. He kissed me and said he’d call from the first stop. I told him not to. We’d gone back and forth about this over the last week. He wanted to stay together; I wanted to break up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with him. Every cell in my body wanted to cling to his irrevocably. It was that I couldn’t put myself through the kind of heartbreak I knew was waiting for me. When my father left, my mother changed our locks and that was that. I knew I hadn’t escaped that particular programming. I didn’t know how to do it differently. I had to cut the cord.
“You’ll come visit next month and then I’ll fly back the one after. We’ll alternate.”
I imagined the worst, on repeat. I’d call and Tobias wouldn’t pick up and I’d see him on the beach with some bikini babe. I didn’t think he’d cheat on me, but I didn’t want to find out. If I ended it now he’d be free to do whatever he wanted in California, and maybe I could spare myself some pain. What I said to him was this: “Long distance doesn’t work. If it’s meant to be, it will be later.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said. “Why are you doing this to us?”
He was right, I didn’t. That was something Jessica would say, something she’d write in steam on the bathroom mirror. I subscribed more to look out for number one. After all, he was. He was leaving. I resented that he was trying to make me the responsible party.
“I do,” I said.
He shook his head. “So come with me.” He hadn’t given up on that. It was his response daily. Just come with me. Let’s do this together. You’ll get a great job there, too.
“Stop,” I said. “I can’t. You know that. I have a career, too, remember? Publishing is a New York business.”
“Of course I remember.” He ran his hand through his hair. It was long then. A full head of curls. “But I want you with me. I want to be there for you. I want to sleep next to you and make you coffee in the morning and be in your life. This is one chapter. The next time, we can go where you need us to.”
“I need us to be here,” I said.
Jessica thought I was crazy. “You love him,” she said. She was frantic. Up until the minute that I walked him downstairs, she was trying to convince me to change my mind. We were in my room, surrounded by a swirl of my things—discarded in the process of packing his. “You’ll regret this, I know you will. Just stay together.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Long distance never works.” What I meant was: I won’t be left. I won’t be left again.
“You don’t know that!” She threw a pillow down hard on my bed. “You found him. Him. Sabrina, I’m serious. Don’t give this up.”
But I did. I didn’t go, and I never asked him to stay. Standing by his car, the summer sun reflecting off my tear-streaked face, the words coursing through my body until I was sure he could read them on my skin. All that came out was “Please.” He thought I meant: Just go, make it quick, don’t ask me again. What I really meant was: Stay.
He held me. We cried into each other’s shoulders. I didn’t know how to say good-bye, so I didn’t.
I went back inside. I drew the blinds and I lay on the floor of my bedroom.
“I don’t know how to be here for this,” Jessica said. She was crying, too.
“So don’t.”
She left. She was due to leave on her honeymoon, and the following week I’d get texts from her periodically. Cabana honey! Of Sumir lounging on a chair by the ocean. Honey-dewing. A plate full of melon and plumerias. I knew it was her attempt at reestablishing normalcy, of taking a break from the fallout. I responded with the like. Yay. Aww. Love. We were both pretending.
In those first early weeks, my coworker Kendra was the only one I confided in. We had both been hired as editorial assistants and started within a month of each other. We were working at an imprint called Bluefire that published mainly children’s books. Kendra was a lifelong young adult fan, and this was her dream job. I was desperate to move into the nonfiction sphere, but everyone told me once you got your foot in the door, moving internally was much easier. Most of our days were spent scheduling meetings and reading from the stack of submissions our bosses got from agents. Kendra was all wide-eyed wonder, out to discover the next Harry Potter. We’d spend lunchtime in the conference room, swapping manuscripts and bagels and trying to find a stepping stone to what came next. I would have loved it if my heart wasn’t completely shattered.
“You need to go out,” Kendra told me. “You know the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”
“What if you like being on top?” I asked.
Kendra’s eyes went wide. “A joke! She lives!” Kendra held her belly, which was round and plump like the rest of her. She had straight black hair and the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, besides Tobias’s. She wore glasses with black wire frames and men’s button-down shirts. She brought Toblerones to work that her mom sent her by the dozen. I was always sugar high.
“I can’t go out,” I said. “It’s only been two weeks.” I hadn’t heard from him since he’d arrived in California. But it was what I had asked of him, and he was respecting that. Living without him felt like a sword to the chest every minute on the minute. There were small things, like his forgotten socks I found in the hamper, or the Le Creuset pot we bought at a yard sale and cooked chili in all winter. The whole apartment made me think of him. The whole city did.
“A friend from college is having a party,” Kendra said. “Harlem. Eight P.M. We can get a marg after work and head up. Stay for twenty minutes.” She stood back and studied me. “Just so, you know, if you kill yourself I can say I tried.”
We went. The party was small—ten people hovered around a love seat and beanbag chair. We drank warm vodka and ate Tostitos, and I stayed three hours. There was a guy there named Paul who worked in the design department two floors above us at Random House. He was short and laughed easily. At the end of the night, I let him kiss me. And then I let him date me for almost two years.