The bedroom looked like the closet and dressers had been violently ill. Random female detritus was scattered everywhere. A new bra, deemed too uncomfortable and a waste of money, had been flung hastily aside and now dangled from the TV by a strap.

“Will you just...talk to me?”

My voice had lost its heat. I knew I sounded desperate, defeated, but I didn’t care anymore. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t change things.

She came charging out of the closet with an armful of clothes, old tee shirts and well broken in sweaters from the looks, and I had to take several quick steps out of the way to keep from being knocked aside. Would be fitting, though. To be just another thing carelessly thrown aside. Something else deemed not important enough to come to this next stage with her.

“Please,” I said again, hardly above a whisper, no heat or feeling left in the request. I was realizing that it wouldn’t help.

She rushed from the room and I heard similar noises of panicked searching in the bathroom. The sound of breaking glass told me she knocked over one of the vases she kept there to “pretty the room up,” but I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose or not. The other noises didn’t slow, but she was in such a state, maybe she hadn’t noticed.

I forced my hands flat on my knees, straightened my back, closed my eyes, and took a deep, slow breath through my nose. When I couldn’t take any more in, I held my breath, listening to my heart thrum in my ears and willing it to slow. I slowly let the breath back out through my nose, always having hated breathing through my mouth—it made me feel sick. I opened my eyes.

She was still in the bathroom, but came charging back down the hall and into the room, arms full. I noticed she’d found a travel case for her toothbrush and wondered idly where it’d been. I didn’t think she’d brought it in with her. Or even planned far enough ahead to have bought one special.

She dumped this latest armful on top of the jumbled clothes in the duffle she’d been packing and started to struggle with the zipper. That was it, then. She was almost done. She was almost gone.

I hadn’t planned to do it, hadn’t realized I was moving until I was in front of her, grasping her by the shoulders and forcing her to face me. I shook her, the hard one-two-three to clear an Etch-A-Sketch.

“Talk to me, dammit!”

She stopped. Met my eyes. And the terror there made me step back until I hit the wall. But somehow I knew, despite the fact that I’d never laid a rough hand on her before, not even in bed, though she’d hinted repeatedly that was what she wanted, that her fear wasn’t of me.

Good god, what was she running from?