She did not tell me.

I found out on the fourth of September from a phone.

The next nine days were bad in the ordinary way that everybody who has been through it knows and that has no literary interest whatsoever.

And on the thirteenth of September she packed, and she did say a version of the sentence about the life she wanted, and I have thought for fifteen years about the exact words and I no longer trust myself on them.

What I do trust, because it is the one bit that never moved in fifteen years of retelling, is what she said in the doorway at the end.