I don’t respond. James has dated me long enough to know all my tells, so he correctly interprets my silence as curiosity.

“I regret it, you know,” he continues, his normally loud and confident voice coming out so quietly that it gives me pause. For once, he almost sounds vulnerable. “Breaking up with you, I mean. I was… scared. After we got engaged, everything got so serious. Marriage, kids, all of that was suddenly around the corner, like boom, boom, boom. I missed the days when we could have fun without thinking about all that serious stuff.”

“You proposed to me, James,” I reply. “You decided to take the next step with me.”

“I know. But also, like, of course I did! The one thing I was sure about was my feelings about you. Everything else, though…” He sighs. “In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t called things off when I did.”

A thrill of satisfaction runs through me. But I keep my voice low and steady when I ask, “Then why did you?”

The day we broke up, I walked away from this condo without getting a straight answer from him. I just let that slide, allowing James to tear my life apart without even knowing why. Granted, if I’m being fair to myself, I was in a lot of shock and pain. But today, I’m completely calm. Keeping my eyes fixed on his, I cross my arms across my chest and wait.

James sighs again, and nervously says, “Look, this isn’t how I wanted this conversation to go. I mean, come on, you’re thirty now, too, so you know what it’s like… it’s terrifying…”

He can’t even meet my gaze. In fact, he’s staring down at the floor, doing everything in his power to not make eye contact with me. I’m hit with the memory of how he acted the Monday after the breakup. Like I was invisible. Before, I thought it was some superiority complex, an arrogant display of “I’m perfectly fine without you.” But now, in my much calmer state, I realize he’s not trying so hard to avoid eye contact because he thinks he’s better than me.

He’s avoiding it because he’s hiding something.

I’m suddenly reminded of how Daphne glared at me in the printer room a couple weeks after James’s and my breakup. How, unlike James, she didn’t even try to talk to me at the holiday party. She didn’t act like she was embarrassed or ashamed to be someone’s fast, messy rebound. She treated me like I was an interloper. In their relationship.

“Did you sleep with Daphne?” I ask. “While we were still together. Is that why you wanted to break up?”

James’s eyes widen. But he doesn’t say anything, keeping his gaze fixed on the floor.

That’s all the answer I need.