On her full-size bed, which had always been too small for both of them, she straddled his stomach and kissed him with her mouth open wide so he couldn’t breathe.

Had Phil been able to speak, he would have said, “Thank you.”

She allowed him to enter her without a condom, which had only happened twice before, once when they first said “I love you” and once toward the end of the relationship when they were both very drunk. As Phil watched Elizabeth move up and down on top of him, he decided they would get married and have a baby girl. Maybe he would move to California. He liked Dodger Stadium.

But none of that happened. Not long after their reconciliation, early in July, Elizabeth told Phil she’d changed her mind about a second chance.

“I thought this was what I wanted, but I just keep wondering when it’s going to blow up again,” Elizabeth explained calmly. “You were right. I’m eventually going back to California, and you’re always going to be here.”

“Sure,” Phil said, because there wasn’t anything else to say. He thought of what so many coaches said after lost games, when they spoke to fill the silence at press conferences. “It is what it is,” he muttered.

Elizabeth continued, justifying her departure without the tears he’d grown accustomed to during their previous relationship talks. “There’s nothing to suggest that anything is different here. You haven’t asked me to move in, and let’s face it, you’re not going to. People don’t change. You haven’t, and I certainly haven’t. I love you, but I have to move on. We both do.”

She waited then in anticipation of his response, but he froze, not knowing what else to say to her. Was he supposed to ask her to move in—right that second? Was he supposed to tell her he wanted to marry her?

Before he could decide on an appropriate statement, Elizabeth hunched forward, kissed Phil on his forehead, got up from the couch, wiped her eyes with her pointer fingers as if she’d cried, and walked through his door, closing it politely behind her.

Once school started again, Phil began tracking Elizabeth’s comings and goings so he could catch her in the elevator, anything to remind her that he was still next door, just a few feet away. He found himself leaving the apartment when he didn’t need to, running fake errands to increase the odds of a sighting.

Then, last Wednesday, Phil got his wish. He saw Elizabeth walking down the hall in her date-night best, her knee-length floral skirt and a light blue shirt that he believed was the only thing she owned with a collar. In that moment he knew it was really over.

Less than two hours later, Phil used his Doritos-stained fingers to call Hank and bet more than two grand on Oregon.

Rob

Rob answered the phone. “Who is it?” he asked in a facetious singsong falsetto. He was lying in bed, reading a two-month-old New Yorker that he’d swiped from the periodical room at work the day before. He’d been drifting into sleep when the phone began to buzz. Hannah panted through the phone, skipping the greeting.