At 1:04, the pounding began at your front door, hard enough to make the hallway mirror tremble. You didn’t move from your bedroom. You watched the live feed from the doorbell camera while Ethan staggered on your porch in the same navy button-down he had worn to brunch last Sunday, his face red, jaw tight, one hand braced on the railing as if righteousness required a little balance.
You texted him once.
You said you were sleeping at Lara’s. I just helped with the move.
After that, the silence lasted almost two hours. Long enough for you to think he had finally chosen a porch and died of his own audacity. Long enough for your body to unclench, one muscle at a time. Long enough for sleep to begin circling the edges of you before Lara’s whisper dragged you back upright in the dark.
“Listen to me carefully,” Lara says now. “There’s a small velvet ring box in here. It has your initials on a jeweler’s envelope. And there are printed wire transfer confirmations with your name. One from tonight.”
Every nerve in your body goes hot.
“What kind of wire transfer?”
“I don’t know. It says twenty-eight thousand four hundred dollars. There’s some LLC listed, Ridgewell Consulting or Ridgecrest, something like that.” She’s breathing fast now. “Vivian, I swear to God I didn’t know. He told me you were unstable and wouldn’t let go, and I know how that sounds now, but he said you were done, that you were still sharing the place only because the lease was complicated. He said he’d been trying to leave.”
You laugh then, a small ugly laugh that sounds nothing like humor. Ethan always did love a prewritten script. He had one for bosses, one for bartenders, one for your friends, one for his mother, one for every woman in every room. Apparently the one for Lara cast you as the clingy ex haunting a man who heroically wanted freedom.
“Did he tell you he owned half my couch too?” you ask.
