The cheating, the lies, all of it should hollow out every last word. And yet somehow, in a way that disturbs me, it doesn’t.

I forward his email to Renata, who calls me moments later. “Love aside,” she says, “what matters is how he treated you.”

“I know,” I say, but then I find myself telling her about the emptiness, the feeling I’ve always experienced afterward, how I didn’t feel it with him, how with him, I felt fulfilled. I felt healthy.

“Then maybe it’s time you find some healthy love.”

•

He sends more emails. Several each day, and their heaviness drains me. “There may come a time when you want to see me again,” he writes. “And then, if you allow me a chance, I’ll show you that the guy you knew, the one who wanted to stand by you in your life and your career, is really me, this time without baggage.”

Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.

“Trust me,” I write back, emboldened by hurt, “there will never be a time when I want to see you again.”

He continues to write to me. He begs me to see him before he leaves, half an hour, just thirty minutes. “There are things I am aching to tell you,” he writes, “and I can’t help but feel that the clock is ticking.”

It’s true. He’s leaving in a few days. And I feel it, too, the pressure of time running out, though at this point it shouldn’t matter. I’ve lost all faith in him. But the danger exists, that I might still leap.

Finally, I concede. “I will meet you in a public place, for one drink.”

I bury my face in my hands, wishing he were already gone.

•

We meet at a wine bar several blocks from my apartment. The things he is “aching to say” turn into four hours of conversation, two bottles of Malbec, and countless tears. “I was just using her,” he says. “To protect myself from getting hurt. You were just so … distant, and I was falling deeper and deeper in love.”

I internalize his implicit criticism, his blaming his cheating on me. “Well, I was scared too,” I say. “And trust me, I’m more scared now.”

“Don’t be!” he says. “There are no more secrets now. I’m just so relieved to be through with Clare.”