She stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee, and as she did, her doorbell rang. Hope rose in her heart—it was Max, he’d come back, he had a solution for everything, he’d figured out a way for them to work after all.

She raced to the door, without bothering to put on a bra or do anything to her hair. But when she stopped to look through the peephole, her heart dropped. It wasn’t Max at all, just some sort of deliveryman. Probably with those shoes, or purse, or dress she’d ordered the week before in her fit of missing Max. She watched through the peephole until the deliveryman put down whatever he was holding and drove away. But when she cracked open the door to grab her package, it wasn’t the box she’d expected. It was a bakery bag.

She sighed and brought the bag into the kitchen.

“I love you” the cake read, in blue letters on top of the chocolate frosting.

Yeah, she knew. She didn’t doubt his love for her, that wasn’t what this was all about—hadn’t he listened at all to what she’d said? She shut the box and took her coffee back to bed.

Three more cakes arrived over the next two days. She stacked them all on her kitchen counter, untouched. She should drop them off at the food pantry, but that would mean she’d have to answer some difficult questions from Jamila, and she’d spent all weekend ignoring her texts. Instead she’d watched marathons of the Real Housewives of New York City, Atlanta, and Orange County. Strangely, these women and their awful relationships all made her feel better about her own choices. That was, until she was in bed in the middle of the night, without Max next to her, without his love and affection and desire for her. He’d loved her, wholly, completely, in a way no one had ever loved her before. And never would again, she was sure of that. How could she have let that go?

She probably should have told him long ago how hard all this was on her. But for so many years, she’d learned how to suck it up, pretend to the world everything was fine, even when she was miserable inside. A lot of times, she even pretended that to herself. She didn’t blame Max for not knowing what a hard time she’d had with everything. But she knew she couldn’t go back to the way it had been.