She woke on a Monday to find his side of the bed cold.This was not unusual. He sometimes woke early — the headaches, he'd said, without elaborating; she'd stopped pushing. She expected to hear the coffee maker. She lay for a moment listening.Nothing.She got up. The kitchen was empty. His coat was gone from the hook by the door.She told herself he'd gone for a walk. She made coffee. She checked her phone. No message — but that wasn't necessarily alarming. He was sometimes slow to text in the mornings.She drank the coffee and waited.At nine she texted: "Good morning. Where are you?"At ten she called. It rang four times and went to voicemail."Hey, it's me. Call when you get this."By noon something cold had settled in her stomach that she was not yet ready to name.She walked to his building. She knew his entry code. She went upstairs.His door was locked. She knocked. Waited. Knocked again.She went back downstairs and knocked on the super's door. The super, Mr. Pelletier, was a man of approximately seventy who smelled of pipe tobacco and took nothing urgently."The young man in 4B," he said, when she'd explained. "He left. Yesterday evening. Had his bags packed. I helped him with one of them to the car."Maya looked at him."He didn't say where he was going?""Mentioned he had family out west, I think." A pause. "He said to give you this, if you came."He disappeared into his apartment and returned with an envelope. Her name on it, in Daniel's handwriting.She waited until she was outside, sitting on the building steps in the cold, to open it.Inside was a single index card.
I'm sorry. You deserve better than this. Better than me, right now. Please don't look for me. I'll explain when I can. — DShe read it three times. Then she sat very still on the steps.People walked past. A dog pulled at its lead. Somewhere, a bus went by.She thought about her father's phone call. I'm not coming back. No explanation. Just the fact of it.She thought about what she'd said, weeks ago, in the coffee shop: If you love someone, you owe them the truth. Even if the truth is hard. Especially then.She looked at the index card. Four sentences. No truth.She put it back in the envelope. She put the envelope in her pocket.She walked home. She did not cry on the street because she had given herself a four-minute limit, years ago, and she was not ready to use it.She saved it for later, when she was inside, alone, with the red umbrella by the door and the drawings on the wall and the small pot of herbs on the windowsill that he'd bought and she'd kept watering without examining why.
