I heard the sink in the bathroom running and turned back toward the sofa. On the hallway wall I noticed pictures of him with women, maybe friends, maybe not, in vacation locales like Angkor Wat and snowcapped mountains far away. What was he like then? Where were these women now? It seemed as though there should have been a steady stream of mourners waiting by the door, but there was just me. There were also photos of Daniel dressed in sand-colored fatigues in the desert.

“Where is this mountain?” I asked, as he came up behind me.

“The Andes. I used to snowboard,” he said. “I did a lot.”

“It looks like it.”

“I’m not some sad sack who wishes he got to do more. I did enough.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Most people never do much with their lives.”

I liked being antagonized by him. He knew exactly what to do.

35.

Bobby texted me later that evening and said, I have a box for you.

His insistence that I needed to retrieve an oversized mug and some small objects that I had forgotten about told me that this wasn’t about the objects at all. I had been watching from a distance as he sent out sale notices about our furniture, and even some items he had bought on his own after we split. He said he had to get rid of them right away. He was redecorating, he said. It’s her, I thought. As I climbed out of my car, I sniffed the air, hoping for a whiff of the jasmine or orange-blossom blooms that I associated with coming here, coming home. But the air only smelled of eucalyptus leaves drying in the late-summer heat. It would not cool down again until November, when you’d start to feel the slight sweat of night humidity again.

I’d left some of the things I cared about with Bobby because I didn’t want them to end up with strangers. I was also leaving the memories associated with those items. When I walked up to the door of our old apartment, I was happy I didn’t have to see my old neighbors again: all their windows were dark. Bobby gave me a small, neat box before I even came into the apartment. We had agreed to dinner. And as we drove there, being together once again felt so familiar that I was thrust back into the feelings of being in a couple. Not buoyancy, but comfort. We were driving to the same restaurant we always used to go to, and when we sat down to order, we ordered the same things we always ordered.