I stood under hot water until my skin turned pink, watching glitter from my wedding makeup circle the drain. I had thought I would wake up that morning beside my husband in a hotel suite overlooking the bay. Instead, I washed dust from my hair in my father’s house while attorneys traced money I had trusted to a man who called me plain rice.
My sadness did not arrive as one storm. It came in small, humiliating waves.
The toothbrush Elias kept at my apartment.
His handwriting on grocery lists.
The way he used to warm my hands between his palms in movie theaters because I was always cold.
Had he hated those moments? Or had he simply been able to perform tenderness the way some people performed music, beautifully and without meaning?
At nine that night, I opened our wedding album preview. The photographer had already sent ten images.
There we were beneath the arch, my veil moving in the wind, Elias looking at me as if the world had narrowed to my face.
I enlarged the photo until his eyes filled the screen.
I searched for greed.
I found devotion.
That was worse.
Because either I could not tell the difference, or devotion and greed could wear the same expression.
On the third day, Elias came to the apartment.
Rebecca had arranged for my cousin Nathan and two movers to meet me there so I could collect clothes, documents, and personal items. My father wanted to send staff, but I refused. I needed to walk through those rooms once before they became evidence in someone else’s file.
The apartment sat on the fourth floor of a renovated building in the Mission, with tall windows and old wooden floors that creaked near the kitchen. I had loved it the first time I saw it. Loved the morning light, the blue tiles in the bathroom, the tiny balcony just wide enough for two chairs and a basil plant.
When I unlocked the door, everything looked untouched.
The coffee mugs we chose together. The framed print from our first trip to Monterey. The half-built bookshelf Elias promised to finish after the honeymoon.
Nathan watched me from the doorway. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Fair.”
He was my age, blunt in a way I usually found annoying but now found comforting.
I walked to the bedroom and opened the closet. My side was neat. Elias’s side looked disturbed, hangers shoved aside, drawers half-opened.
“He’s been here,” I said.
Nathan stepped closer. “Want me to check the rest?”
Before I could answer, the front door opened.
