STRAIGHT TO THE AIRPORT

ANNA

Anna had been awake for hours before the sun finally appeared. She'd lain in the dark listening to Maya's steady breathing from the couch and had taken in every sound of the apartment. The refrigerator's hum. The faint traffic from the street below. The way the floorboards creaked near the door.

She was saying goodbye to it before she'd even gotten out of bed.

She gave up on sleep and made coffee. She showered and by eight A.M. She stood in the center of the living room with her single suitcase and her carry-on and looked at what remained. The boxes for storage, the leaving pile would go to donation, and the furniture that belonged to the apartment would stay exactly where it was for the next person.

Maya appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her hair spiked up in different directions. She looked at Anna standing in the middle of the room and said nothing for a long moment.

"That's it?" she finally asked.

"Yeah." Anna looked at the suitcase. The carry-on. The small box of things she couldn't bear to ship, her mother's photograph, the cactus, and a few books with cracked spines. "Apparently."

Maya crossed the room and put her arm around Anna's shoulders in a side hug.

"I'm going to miss you," Maya said.

"You're coming to visit in three months."

"I know. I'm still going to miss you." She squeezed once, then let go. "Right. Shower. Coffee. Then we load this disaster into my vehicle and get you on a plane."

The loading took forty minutes and involved more swearing than Anna had anticipated.

Maya's vehicle was too small for the luggage, they maneuvered and rearranged and at one point Maya simply stood back and said, "I don't think it's going to fit," which was exactly the wrong thing to say to Anna at eight forty-five in the morning with a flight at eleven.

"It has to fit."

"Physics doesn't care about your flight."

"Make physics care."

Maya looked at her for a long moment, then turned back to the vehicle and approached it with the focused attention of someone solving a puzzle. Twenty minutes later, through a combination of angles and brute force that Anna chose not to examine too closely, the suitcase was inside. The carry-on went on the back seat. The box of precious things went at Anna's feet.

They stood on the pavement and looked at the apartment building one last time.

"You could go back up," Maya said. "Say goodbye properly."

Anna shook her head. "I said it this morning. I don't need to do it again."

"Then get in. You're going to miss your flight."

Anna got in the car, but not without a last look at the house as Maya drove them to the airport.

The drive was quiet. Maya put on music, they drove through the streets Anna had walked a thousand times, past the café where she'd had her first coffee with Jack, past the park where they'd spent Sunday afternoons in the beginning, past the turning that led to the office she would never enter again.

She watched it all slide past the window and felt the strange sensation of becoming a stranger to a place that had been home.

Maya said suddenly. "Jack won't forget you. Not because he loved you, but because you're the one who walked out. Men like him don't forget that. It lives in them forever." Anna turned to glance at her, she thought about Jack in the lobby yesterday, calling after her, trying to make her turn around. She thought about the texts she'd ignored, the calls she'd declined. She hadn't looked at her phone since she'd accepted Enoch's offer. She wasn't sure she ever wanted to look at it again.

"I don't care if he remembers me," she said. "I care if I remember him. And I can wait to forget."

"Good."

They drove the rest of the way in comfortable silence.

The airport terminal rose ahead of them like the entrance to another world, all glass and steel and the constant motion of people arriving and leaving. Maya pulled into the drop-off lane and put the vehicle in park, and they sat for a moment with the engine running and the weight of goodbye pressing down on both of them.

"I'm not going to cry," Anna said.

"You're definitely going to cry."

"No. I've decided. I'm done crying for a while. I'm saving it for the plane when no one can see me."

Maya smiled softly, reached across and took her hand.

"Come on." Maya got out of the vehicle. "Let's get your luggage out before I get a ticket."

They stood on the pavement with the suitcase between them and the chaos of the airport swirling around them and Anna looked at her best friend and felt the full weight of what she was leaving.

"You have to come," Anna said. "London. Three months. I'm holding you to it."

"I'll be there." Maya pulled her into a hug that was tight and warm and lasted longer than either of them would admit. "I'll be there, and we'll drink terrible tea, and you'll show me your fancy office, and I'll tell you if your crush is as beautiful in person as you claim"

"He's not my crush," Anna blushed. "Fine. You can tell me."

Maya pulled back and looked at her with those eyes that saw too much. "You're going to be okay. More than okay. You're going to be magnificent. And when you look back on this day five years from now, you're going to realize it was the best thing that ever happened to you."

Anna wanted to argue. Wanted to say that five years of her life had just been reduced to luggage and a cactus, and she couldn't see how that could possibly be the best thing. But she looked at Maya's steady face, and she nodded instead.

"Text me when you land."

"First thing." Anna hugged her one more time, quick and fierce, and then she grabbed her suitcase and walked toward the terminal doors and didn't look back.

As she walked through the sliding doors into the terminal, some part of her that she couldn't control was scanning the crowd, checking faces, waiting for Jack to appear, and it annoyed her to a bitter end.

Stop it, she told herself. Stop it right now. She kept walking.