“Take it,” Glenna said, her voice hoarse from screaming.

“I can’t.”

“Just take it.”

I shook my head, and when I put the calfskin case with her house key on the desk, my throat got so tight with sadness I thought I’d choke.

Going up and down the staircase and out the front door to load my belongings in the GTO, I realized that I was done walking across these warped pine boards—done sitting in the living room, done seeing the posters on the white plaster walls, done building fires in the fieldstone fireplace.

Yet, somehow, as I reentered the bedroom again and again, I was convinced that Glenna was going to say, Don’t be goofy, Gordo, don’t leave. I love you.

Instead, she sat staring at me, the muscles twitching around her eyes. She didn’t speak until I picked up the last bag.

“I used to think …”

Softly I replied, “Think what, Glenna?”

Her voice barely above a whisper, she said, “I used to think the happiest day of my life would be having a baby with you.”

She began to cry, a spate of sharp sobs that shook her from head to toe. I felt myself sag, drained from our fighting. I put down the bag and went to her, kneeling in front of the window seat and wrapping my arms around her. She held on to me, sobbing on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I could feel Glenna nodding against me, still crying, and I felt as though I could kneel there forever—as long as Glenna let me hold her, as long as I didn’t have to lose her. Slowly, her sobbing and quivering subsided. I knew this meant that we were approaching our end, and I held her even tighter, closing my eyes, wishing myself a future with Glenna that I knew we wouldn’t have. She pulled back from me, whispering, “Go now,” and I got up, and she tilted her head toward me, and a sob caught in my throat when I said, “I don’t want to,” and she said, “Please, Gordon, please go,” and I picked up my bag again, and before leaving I paused in the doorway, watching Glenna wipe the tears from her face with the sleeve of her terry-cloth robe while the moonlight shone through the window behind her.

OUTSIDE, I took several deep breaths of the frosty air and tried to wrap my mind around the fact that I would never return to this place.

Turning around for a last look at the house, I remembered the first evening I’d come to pick up Glenna, a warm September evening so full of promise, and the sense that I’d had as I rapped on the door with the brass knocker that once I went inside, I’d never want to leave.

I didn’t want to leave now, though there didn’t appear to be any choice. Moving out from under the bare branches of the gnarled oaks, I glanced up at Glenna’s window. Her Japanese lantern was still on, and I saw her standing and staring down at me, a silhouette sealed behind glass and backlit by a pastel glow. I started to wave, but before I could get my arm all the way up, the lantern went off and the window was dark.