The mystery of love—yes, it had enthralled me, and now here we were, lost in its unanswerable riddle. I still couldn’t figure it out, why I had ever loved a monster. Some days he felt like a warm rain, but recently he had become a torrent sweeping me out to a stormy sea, drowning me.

Now here I stood over him, wrapped in Sunday morning nostalgia, watching him sleeping in the Ethan Allen four-poster bed we shared, controlling my breath as I whispered my good-byes. I reminisced about the idyllic weekends of long ago. Pure heaven. The scent of French roast coffee wafting to our bedroom, the humming stillness of the house, two lovers pretzeled together beneath mulberry silk sheets, our bodies sweat-glazed from creative and energetic sex.

Now that was laughable, really. His touch burned me, his lips disgusted me. Not because of time’s toll on our bodies—gravity works extra hard after age forty, you know. It wasn’t that. It was the slow rot of who he used to be. Once upon a time, we cuddled like two toothbrushes in a cup, the length of our bodies resting on one another. I wished I could reach that man today, right now, but I knew he was long gone.

I thought about the apology flowers he had just bought me, how his face lit up as he handed them to me. How I tenderly placed them in a vase, admiring his thoughtfulness for a moment. That moment had dried up with the crisp petals currently scattered along the coffee table. Wilted, dead flowers—they were my marriage’s final curtain call, but they weren’t enough. Not to save us. Not to save him.

“Remember when we first got married and lived in that tiny apartment in the basement of Cat Lady’s house?” The whispered question was more for myself than for him. I didn’t want to risk waking him. I shook the memory loose.

Cat Lady was the nickname we gave the white-haired woman who rented out her basement to us. We could never remember her actual name—it was Slavic, with too many syllables for our all-American tongues to pronounce—but she had at least a dozen cats that we counted the only time she let us into the first floor of the house. The ammonia stench took our breath away; it was a wonder the waterfalls of cat piss didn’t leak through the floorboards into the ceiling of our apartment below. Life had been so full of adventure and hope back then.

“We used to snuggle up on that ratty old sofa we found on the curb, talking about our plans for the future.” I smiled at the memory. Reaching out a finger, I touched his stubbly cheek and recoiled in distaste.