Having worked myself up into a strong and righteous indignation, I gathered my books and marched up to the apartment. As I ascended the stairs I went over the various ways he might respond: ignore me or pretend nothing had happened, yell at me for something he had no business yelling at me about, plead for me to forgive him, and so on. For each of them I came up with a response that would show him I was not one to be kicked around. In fact, I marveled that I even had to do this; we were a good couple. Granted, he did some things that drove me mad, but I was sure there were things about me that irritated him too. But there wasn’t anything we couldn’t work out. We just needed to spend some time together, to sit down and talk about how weird things had been lately and why, and figure out what we could do to fix them.

I reached the apartment and, with a final deep breath and squaring of the shoulders, opened the door and went in.

Three plain brown boxes sat in the middle of the living room. What had he bought? I closed the door behind me and set the books on the entry table before shrugging off my jacket. “Dylan?”

I heard him curse softly from the bedroom. “Back here,” he barked. I had started toward the bedroom when he appeared with a fourth box in his arms. He set it atop one of the others, deliberately avoiding my eyes, and then grabbed his jacket from the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

“Finally getting rid of some stuff?” I asked. It was the only explanation I could think of, that he’d gotten around to going through his side of the closet and his boxes in the storage closet on the balcony, something he’d promised to do for months.

He zipped up the leather bomber he’d been wearing since we’d met and hefted one of the boxes, still not meeting my gaze. “No. I’m moving out.”

I blinked. I blinked again. Then I remembered to breathe, and eventually I remembered how to speak, but by that time he was out the door with the first of the four boxes. I stood in place, not knowing where to move to, and watched silently as a few minutes later he returned and took down the second box, then the third, then the fourth. Then he didn’t come back up. I finally stumbled to the balcony and walked out to the railing, staring over to the parking lot. I saw my car, its windshield already frosted, and the empty space next to it, a rectangle of blacktop stark against the snow where his car had sheltered it since that morning.