Chapter 3: Gone before morning

The first thing I notice is the light.

It creeps through the windows in thin pale strips, quiet and grey, like the morning hasn't fully committed to itself yet. Chicago is still out there but from up here it looks almost peaceful.

I lie still and listen.

Caleb is asleep beside me. Breathing slow and even, one arm thrown above his head, completely unbothered. The sheets are twisted around his waist and his face in sleep looks younger somehow. Less composed. Like sleep is the only place he lets his guard down.

I need to leave.

The thought is clean and immediate. This is the part I know how to do. The morning after has never been difficult for me because the morning after requires nothing from you except movement and I am very good at movement.

I sit up slowly. He shifts, arm reaching across the space where I was, and my chest does something I ignore. He stills. Still asleep.

I find my dress, pull it on, zip it up. My earrings go into my bag instead of back onto my ears. I pick up my heels and hold them by the straps.

At the door I stop.

I stand there with my hand on the handle and my shoes dangling from my fingers and I tell myself to go. The night was good. More than good. But it was one night and one night was the agreement I made with myself the moment I took his hand and that agreement does not change just because he was more than I expected.

I tell myself all of that.

I stay at the door longer than I should.

There is nothing dramatic about it. No tears, no grand internal war. Just me standing in the early morning quiet of a stranger's apartment being honest with myself about the fact that leaving feels harder than it should. That bothers me more than anything else. I don't do hard exits. I don't linger. I don't stand at doors.

I open the door and I leave.

The elevator ride down is quiet. The lobby is empty except for a security guard who looks up and then graciously looks back down. I walk through barefoot, heels still in hand, and push out into the morning.

The air is cold and sharp and smells like coffee and the lake. I pull out my phone, order a car and lean against the building while I wait.

Two minutes.

I look up at the building once without meaning to. Thirty something floors of glass and steel, Caleb somewhere near the top, still asleep, completely unaware that I am standing on the sidewalk below doing something that feels uncomfortably close to hesitating.

I look back at my phone.

The car is one minute away.

I push off the wall and that is when I see it. Through the lobby window, on the narrow shelf beside the elevator bank. A row of framed photos I walked past last night without really seeing.

My eyes catch on one.

Three people in a backyard. Summer. A man with Caleb's jaw standing with his arm around a woman, both of them laughing. And beside them a younger boy, maybe sixteen, grinning the wide easy grin of someone who has been comfortable in front of this particular camera his whole life.

I know that grin.

I have known that grin my entire life.

My car pulls up to the curb.

I get in. I close the door. I face forward and I tell myself the light was strange and I am tired and tired eyes make mistakes.

I do not look back at the photo.

I should

have looked back at the photo.