As the shuttle bus carried me away from the Ledge and toward the Nashville airport, emails started popping up on my liberated cell phone. It took forty-five minutes for them all to appear. I checked my voice mail; I had three new messages, all from my mother. I hesitated before pressing play. My heart flapped like a bucketed fish as I listened to each of them. In her last voice mail her pleading turned angry. “You owe me a phone call,” she rasped. “You owe me.” She pronounced owe as “awe.” You awe me.

“I owe you nothing,” I said out loud, then tucked the phone away in the front pocket of my backpack. The driver looked up at me in the rearview mirror. My throat tickled from the quiver in my voice.

At the airport my flight was delayed, meaning I would miss my connection through Detroit. I was still in the mind-set of the Recently Converted, and I told myself it was just my Higher Power at work. I breezed over to the check-in counter. “Anything you guys can do?”

Somehow they managed to get me on a direct flight to New York. “Just give us a minute to get your bags off the delayed flight and onto this one!”

I landed at JFK and took the A train back to my apartment. I’d asked the subletter to leave the keys with the bartender at the restaurant below my building, and I stopped in to grab them before heading upstairs. I climbed the five flights two steps at a time and arrived at my doorstep. I gathered up the takeout menus and flyers that had been left there. I opened the door, flipped on the lights, and immediately felt the sting of Anna’s absence. It was everywhere: in the missing fridge magnets, the half-full closets, the photo book she’d made of us, still sitting on the coffee table. Over my twenty-eight days, I’d managed to stop thinking about her, along with most everything else on the outside. But now I wondered what she’d been doing, where she was living. Was she already seeing someone? Just the thought made me ache.

As the sting subsided, anxiety came rushing in. I had two weeks to sell my furniture and pack up all my stuff before the lease ran out. I took stock of everything I needed to sell—a bed, a couch, coffee table, bookshelf, desk and chair—then plopped down on the couch and realized I was hungry. I decided to order takeout and reached for the stack of menus, fumbling through them before choosing an Indian restaurant. I looked at my phone; I’d have to wait another fifteen minutes before it opened. At exactly five o’clock I called and placed an order. I then unzipped my suitcase and attempted to unpack until the food arrived. After scarfing down chicken tikka masala, I passed out.