As I walked to my car, I saw a FOR RENT sign and looked at the building. It was on a busy street, thick vines of green ivy separating the building from the exhaust and cars. I dialed the number on the sign and was surprised when a man picked right up.

“I’m calling about the apartment.”

“Are you outside?”

“I am. I wanted to see it.”

I felt like I was doing something inappropriate. The first toe dipped into a new life.

“I’ll come to the gate,” he said.

I hung up and waited for him to come down. He was bald and wearing shorts and a dirty white T-shirt and looked like I had interrupted his afternoon.

“Sorry, I was just calling for an appointment,” I said.

“It’s fine. I live here.”

He brought me up the stairs of the complex, a mid-century Hollywood standard, with courtyards and small chairs and overgrown indoor houseplants in mismatched planters outside tenants’ front steps. Everything had a thin layer of dust on it from the exhaust pumped up from the street.

“Did you just start looking?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We just put the sign up. The apartment is a one-bedroom. It’s kind of loud, but what do you expect on this street.”

He opened the door to the empty apartment. Our footsteps echoed on the wood floor as he showed me around. The living room was small, but airy. The kitchen was teal-tiled, with the small nooks ubiquitous in apartments of this era. Everything had been painted in white several times over, possibly yearly. It still smelled like the latest coat. As he talked, I ducked from room to room and imagined starting my life over here and what it would feel like, coming home and being alone in it night after night. There were no signs of people in the courtyard, no sounds of them coming from behind the hallway doors. The entire place felt empty, a place you come to live in between other stops in your life.

“Did you just get to Los Angeles?”

“No, I’ve been here.”

“Will you be living alone, then?”

“I think so.”

“It’s a little small for a couple, but people have done it before.”

“I’m not in a couple.”

I could see him looking at my wedding ring and I didn’t say anything. This apartment wouldn’t fit my things, even half of them. I would have to buy everything new, cobble together a life I could make small again—half the size it was now.

Walking through the apartment felt like trying on another life. I felt like I was cheating by making a big decision without Bobby. But I knew this wasn’t going to be my apartment. This was me pushing myself. Could I do it: could I leave yet or not?

Today I couldn’t.

12.