Until Ray called from the office.

“Hey, babe. I’m ready.”

“Me too.”

But he was ready for something else.

“Ready for a change,” he added. “See, I love you, but . . .”

My heart skittered up my chest, my skin chilling as the hair on my arms stood on end. No good sentence ever began with I love you, but . . .

His I love you, but was that he was moving to Macau in China. He’d landed a job there and would be moving out, putting the apartment up for sublet, and going away.

That was that.

There was no invitation to come along.

There was no explanation.

It was a clean break, and I was sliced from his life.

Neatly, without any blood spilled.

He did as promised. He left immediately.

Like any modern woman, I turned to my girlfriends, to my Singer sewing machine (which I used to make voodoo dolls of Ray, between crying and drowning my frustration in mojitos supplied by Courtney), and to the great World Wide Web for answers. As if I could find a hidden letter from him online. Like he might have pinned a postcard to Google explaining his departure.

But that’s the crazy thing about the internet.

We turn to it for answers. We think the answers exist. The internet has trained us to ask it anything. The search bar is filled with questions that we want the machine to tell us—why am I here, is my wife cheating on me, is he the one?

I tried every permutation of why did my fiancé move to Macau two days before our wedding, and shockingly, Google gave no answers.

All I could figure was he’d been lured by gambling. As soon as I dug into the search for any shred of comfort, I was reminded that Macau is the new gambling capital of the world. It’s rife with casinos and high rollers. Maybe he decided to roll the dice. To ante up bigger bets. For weeks, I clung to the possibility, but I found no closure online or in real life.

No matter where I turned to understand why I’d suddenly become the owner of an unused wedding dress and the seller of a modest diamond ring, I came up with a goose egg for an answer.

I moved out of the apartment I’d shared with him and into my cousin Daisy’s place, returned the gifts that had arrived in advance of the wedding, and buried myself in work until I lost my job.

Now, months later, I stare at a phone call, a dumb smile still splashed on my face, and think maybe I am on the other side at last.

As I head for the train, a nearly foreign sensation bounces around inside my chest.

Something I haven’t felt in a long time but do now, thanks to that phone call.

Hope.

A little later, that hope turns into the next course the universe is serving to me on its silver platter, when a text message arrives.