Chapter 10: Nothing Left to Iron

I stayed there a few minutes, just breathing.

It wasn't heartbreak. Heartbreak needs something left to break. It felt more like standing at the edge of a pool, staring at still water, and realizing I'd been waiting three years for permission to jump.

I finished my sandwich. Washed the plate. Then I went looking through the house.

There was more of him than she'd realized.

She started downstairs, in the rooms she walked through every day without really seeing.

A silver frame on the hallway console. Turks and Caicos. A stranger had snapped the photo, squinting into the sun, while she and Myles stood barefoot on powder-white sand, foreheads pressed together, sunburned and laughing. His arm circled her waist like he was afraid she'd float away. She remembered the joke. She couldn't remember why it had been funny.

On the shelf above the breakfast nook sat a lopsided blue bowl and a chipped mug: WORLD'S OKAYEST DIVER. Both came from their first apartment, a cramped one-bedroom in Silver Lake with a leaky faucet and a view of a brick wall. They'd made the bowl at a pottery class, laughing as the clay sagged under their hands. It came out so crooked they kept it anyway. The mug was his joke the week she qualified for the Olympic trials. She'd tossed loose change in that bowl ever since.

In the living room stood the alabaster lovers from Florence, a foot tall, locked in an embrace. Myles had haggled over them for twenty minutes, mostly to make her laugh, then carried the statue through three airports because nobody else was allowed to touch it. "Our own piece of Italy."

And then the couple stuff. A whole shelf of it.

Champagne flutes engraved with the proposal date. His-and-hers monogrammed robes, still in tissue paper. A leather scrapbook fat with ticket stubs, boarding passes, and one dried rose. A CD he'd burned their first year, a heart scrawled on it in Sharpie. Matching aprons from a couples' cooking class in Napa, where he'd scorched the risotto and blamed her.

She piled everything on the kitchen island until it looked like the gift shop of a relationship.

For a long moment, she just stood there.

Under the sink she found a roll of black garbage bags and almost laughed. Years of history, and it was leaving in the same kind of bag as the banana peels.

She swept it in by the armful. The Turks and Caicos photo went in face-down. Then the bowl, the mug, the lovers, the flutes, the robes, the scrapbook, the CD, the aprons. Glass clinked. Something cracked. She didn't flinch. She knotted the bag twice and dropped it by the door for trash day.

Then she went upstairs.

On the bedroom vanity sat a velvet box. Inside, pearls, creamy and iridescent on a thin gold chain. Bali, six months into dating, their first real vacation. He'd bought them at a tiny beach shop in Uluwatu at sunset and fastened the clasp with sandy fingers. "Pearls for my girl from a small town. You're a rare find." She'd cried on the sand.

Onto the bed.

Second dresser drawer: a diamond tennis bracelet from their first anniversary. A Santa Monica rooftop, a thousand candles, a violinist. "Every diamond is a day I'm glad I met you." She'd counted them later. Exactly 365.

Onto the bed.

Top shelf of the closet, a beige Birkin in its dust cover, her twenty-second birthday. It came in a box the size of a toddler with a single line: "Real LA women carry these." She'd never once set it on the floor. Beside it sat a navy Chanel flap bag from Paris, bought on Rue Cambon in five minutes flat while her arm was still in a sling. "For my brave girl." She'd cried in the fitting room over that one too.

The rest came fast. Emerald earrings for her twenty-fourth, "to match your eyes." A Van Cleef clover necklace from Christmas in Aspen. A gold Cartier bracelet from the night he swore he couldn't wait to marry her. A silk scarf. A watch she'd never worn.

And a crystal ballerina from some airport gift shop. It had cost him almost nothing. It was the one she'd loved most.

Harper held it up to the light. She remembered how he'd laughed handing it over, back when things were simple, when he was just Myles, a boy with a nice smile who looked at her like a miracle.

That boy was never real.

She set the ballerina aside, away from the glitter.

Last, the ring. Big, bright, cold, the one he'd slid onto her finger on a world stage while she bled and shook. It came off easily. She'd lost weight, she realized, and never even noticed.

She dropped it on the pile.

Downstairs, the ballerina went into the trash bag with a small clink she felt more than heard.

The jewelry and designer bags got different treatment. She wrapped them in their dust covers and packed them into a second bag, carefully, because even now they were worth more than most people's cars. A friend of hers ran a luxury resale boutique on Melrose and moved pieces fast, quietly, and for cash.

Every glittering thing Myles had ever given her was about to become something useful. A flight. A hotel. A fresh start.

She tied the second bag and set it beside the first.

Back upstairs, she pulled a suitcase from the closet and laid it open on the bed. No cream cardigans. No beige dresses. Nothing neutral, careful, or polite. She packed her jeans, her worn sneakers, a pair of cutoffs she hadn't touched since college, and a gray hoodie with a hole in the cuff.

Then, buried under winter sweaters at the very back, her fingers found something else. An old warm-up jacket, red, white, and blue, USA stitched across the chest.

She held it a long time. Then she pressed it to her face, breathed in, and laid it aside.

The rest of her gear waited in the bottom drawer, where she'd buried it three years ago like evidence.

Three black competition suits, racerback and cut high at the leg, tight across the body so they wouldn't balloon with water on entry. Chlorine-proof fabric that held its shape through a thousand dives.

Her shammy, bright orange, a synthetic chamois that wrung dry in one twist. Every diver kept one on deck to blot off between rounds. A wet palm meant a slippery grip in the tuck, and a slippery grip could wreck a dive.

Under it, scuffed training goggles. Warm-ups only. From ten meters, a diver hits the water at over thirty miles an hour, fast enough to rip goggles clean off. In competition, she'd always gone in bare-eyed.

She ran a thumb along the faded strap. It still smelled faintly of chlorine.

One by one, everything went into the suitcase, packed with the care of a woman heading into a war she'd finally decided to fight. On top, she laid the jacket. Red, white, and blue, like a flag.

One day. Then Austin.