Inside, Bobby had mixed the things I had left behind with new items that gave the place a more masculine feel. It was like a house that belonged to someone who had eclectic taste, but my taste was still there, my touches, my years of collecting—things I had left behind so as not to look selfish. It was no doubt impressive to women who came over now. My collection of vintage lamps and trinkets gave the appearance of a single man who had his shit together.

While we talked, caught up on each other’s lives, in a conversation that featured no small slights, no sense of resentment, his phone buzzed. He looked down at it and smiled. It was intimate in a way that made me feel embarrassed. Like I was watching the start of something, like I was intruding on someone else’s beginning.

“I’m sorry,” Bobby said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

But he went back to looking at his phone and texting.

I thought about one of our first dates, after we had just slept together for the first time. His phone had buzzed then, too. We were at a restaurant, about to go to a party where I would meet his friends for the first time. People whom I did not know, but who had seen him bring women around before.

“Who is that?” I had asked in the restaurant years ago.

Bobby looked up, still smiling, caught in the moment.

“A friend. It’s nothing. She’s…”

I don’t think I heard anything else.

“Does she know you’re out with someone else?”

“I met her before you,” he said.

“Does she know about me?”

“No, not really.”

His smile faded. He didn’t realize what war he was in. Instead of saying more, I sat in silence. I could have, and should have, left then. We were at the start of our relationship and already these insertions of other people into our twosome were haunting us. Or, more specifically, haunting me. It was in that moment that I catalogued my first resentment, yet still vowed to stay. I wanted to win.

I didn’t tell him that this moment of joy that had nothing to do with me, but was nonetheless unfolding in front of me, hurt. And I wondered why I kept confusing people—him and everyone who came before him—about how to treat me.

As I watched him rush to answer a new text with a smile, as if I wasn’t even there, I was hurt again. He was trying to maintain a beginning with someone else. I didn’t leave him back then in the restaurant, when it would hardly have hurt to leave, because I wanted him to choose me.

But, sitting there, in the apartment we had inhabited together for a number of years, I watched that intimate moment of joy, and knew there was nothing left to win.