Shit.

‘Are… are you okay?’ I ask gently in French, turning back to her.

‘Yes,’ she says in English, sniffing loudly. ‘I will be fine.’ Then she reaches into the cardboard box beside her and pulls out some sort of white garment. There are clear plastic buttons down the front and they catch the light as she holds it up for me to see: boxer shorts. ‘Fucking mens.’

She says it just like that: ‘mens’, plural.

Her arm moves and my gaze follows it. She’s picking up a heavy duty pair of steel scissors that are lying on the recycling bin beside her. They make that shhhh sound as they open and then: snip, snip, snip. Pieces of pale fabric fall into the bin, but her breath seems to slow with the action and her shoulders noticeably relax.

Right.

This all makes sense now.

A breakup.

‘Yeah,’ I say, glancing down into the cardboard box beside her. There’s a shirt in there too – light blue and white checks. This must be about that guy I saw with her a couple of times. ‘Fucking men.’

Snip. Snip. Snip.

‘He disappear!’ she says, looking at me. Her eyes are big, dark and wild. And then her face crumples and she starts to cry again. Her cheeks flush pink. ‘He didn’t even say goodbye.’

I think about Harrison. And me, in those first weeks after he left. I’ve never felt so alone, so out of control, so weak.

That’s when I learned what those sobs mean.

Because heartbreak is such a strange beast; to anyone looking on, it seems like no big deal. Get over it, they think. ‘Your ex wasn’t that great anyway,’ they say. You can see the confusion in their eyes and it makes you feel pathetic. So you master the art of saying, ‘I’m fine,’ and then you go back to searching every crowded street for their face, every traffic jam for their car. But here’s what I’ve learned about hearts: love makes them fragile. And when they snap, it’s rarely a clean break. Those sharp and jagged edges lodge themselves between your ribs, they puncture your lungs, so even breathing hurts. It’s crippling, humiliating, scary. And the damage lasts a lot longer than it ‘should’.

Which is why I promised myself last time that I’d never go through that again.

So chop away, dear neighbour. Whatever gets you through. You’ll get no judgement from me.

But now her cries turn to an embarrassed laugh and then comes a bravado I recognise. She’s thinking, I seem so stupid, so weak. Like we aren’t allowed to mourn. Like sorrow is not simply the watermark of being human; we can deny it as much as we like, but there it is, still visible, when held up to the light.

‘But I don’t cry. I cut!’ she says.

I give her a small smile, pretend I believe her and then glance down at my phone: 8.21.

‘I’m going to be late,’ I say, giving her a you-will-be-fine smile. ‘But if you need anything just knock on my door, okay?’