I fight off my initial urge to detach. It’s strange—after all this time the pain is still there. It’s silent and weakened but still alive. Still breathing.

“After Ryan graduated, he got an internship back in North Carolina and he threw himself into his work. I had just started my junior year and we thought we could handle being apart. In the beginning it was okay, but as time went by I heard from him less and less. He wanted to turn the internship into a job, and it seemed like there wasn’t room for anything else. Including me. We would go days at a time without talking.”

“That’s no fun,” Maggie says. “Was that it then? The distance?”

“No.” I pause, hearing the familiar hiss of a memory as it slithers its way back through my consciousness.

“There was this girl in the internship program with him. Madison. They got close. She would always post pictures of them working late or hanging out on the weekends. Ryan kept saying they were just friends, but thinking of him with her all the time chipped away at me and I couldn’t stop it. She was beautiful. So beautiful that it turned me ugly.”

“Did you say something to him about it?”

“Yes. He would just tell me that they were friends and I had nothing to worry about, but it still felt like he was emotionally cheating. He confided in her. He liked spending time with her. And all the while, I was hundreds of miles away, poring over their every post on social media like a deviant and feeling smaller than I ever knew I could.”

“Did anything happen between them?” Maggie asks.

I don’t answer right away. Instead I look down, noticing the jagged cracks in the weathered concrete.

“When things started to get really strained between us, I flew down to Raleigh to surprise him. I had asked him what he had planned for the weekend and he said he was staying home. I got to his apartment around nine o’clock that night and when I knocked on the door, he didn’t answer. I called him ten times and got sent straight to voice mail.”

We’re in front of the restaurant now but neither of us goes inside. Maggie passes her bag from one shoulder to the other. “What happened next?” she asks.

“I sat outside his apartment until two in the morning before checking into some scary, seedy motel. I think I slept for a total of twenty minutes.”

“Oh, boy.”