You have forty-eight hours to pack your shoes.”

Callum froze.

The last of the color drained out of him, and he seemed all at once smaller, thinner, stripped of the borrowed confidence he had worn like armor for eight months — a man discovering, in the space of a single afternoon, that every surface he had been standing on belonged to the woman he had let his mother pour a drink over.

He had never once, in eight months, asked me a single real question about myself — not what I did, not what I wanted, not what I feared or hoped or had survived.

He had liked the shape of me: the pretty girlfriend, the charming barista, the accessory that fit his life without complicating it.

And now, at the railing, watching me leave, he was learning the price of that incuriosity.