The 10 Years We Were Apart

“Grief is love with nowhere to go.”

— Jamie Anderson

The alarm goes off at seven fifteen, and for three seconds Elena Reyes does not remember. Three seconds of ordinary consciousness—the mechanical process of waking, of registering the gray light through the curtains, of reaching for the phone on her nightstand to silence the sound—and then memory arrives, not gradually but all at once, a wave that breaks over her before she can brace for it, and the world rearranges itself into the shape it has been for the past twenty days: a world without Marcus in it.

She lies still. The phone is in her hand. She checks it the way she has been checking it every morning since the silence began, with a hope so automatic and so futile that it has become indistinguishable from reflex—the way the knee jerks when tapped, the way the eye blinks against dust. No missed calls. No texts. No voicemails. The screen shows nothing but the time and a weather notification she did not ask for: partly cloudy, high of sixty-eight. As though the universe has decided to comment on her emotional landscape with such crude, obvious metaphor that even the sky cannot commit to one thing or another.

She has class at nine. Art History 401, Professor Whitfield, the seminar on vernacular architecture that she registered for in April because Marcus said she would love it, because Marcus said the professor was brilliant, because Marcus said they could walk to class together on Tuesday mornings and stop for coffee at the place on Elm Street, the one with the narrow counter where their elbows kept bumping.

She gets up. She showers. She dresses in clothes she does not remember choosing and will not remember wearing by the end of the day. She eats half a piece of toast standing at the kitchen counter, chewing mechanically, tasting nothing, the bread like wet cardboard in a mouth that has forgotten how to be hungry. She picks up her bag. She opens the front door.

Sarah is already in the kitchen. She is making tea—Elena’s mug, the blue one with the chipped handle, filled with chamomile, a thread of honey stirred through it, exactly the way Elena likes. Sarah holds it out with both hands, the gesture somehow liturgical, a small domestic sacrament. Her face is soft with concern. Her eyes are dark and watchful and full of a sympathy that radiates from her like warmth from a hearth.

“How are you feeling?” Sarah asks.

The question is so sincere, so weighted with genuine care, that Elena almost starts crying again. She doesn’t. She takes the tea. She wraps her hands around the mug and lets the warmth seep into her palms, and she says, “I’m fine,” which is the first lie of the day but will not be the last.

“You don’t have to go to class,” Sarah says. She is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, one bare foot propped on the other, and there is something in her posture that Elena reads as protectiveness—a mother bird with one wing slightly extended, ready to shelter. “You can email Whitfield. Tell him you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Elena.”

“I’m not sick,” Elena repeats, and the repetition is a kind of incantation, a spell she is casting against the part of herself that wants to crawl back into bed and stay there for a month. “If I stay home, I’ll just—” She stops. She does not finish the sentence, because the end of it is too honest for seven thirty in the morning. If she stays home she will call Marcus. She will call him again, and again, and she will listen to his voicemail greeting and she will leave a message that sounds desperate because she is desperate, and then she will hate herself for it, and the self-hatred will be worse than the grief, because at least grief is passive. Self-hatred requires energy, and she has none to spare.

“I need to go,” she says. “I need to be normal.”

Sarah nods. She squeezes Elena’s arm as she passes—a brief, firm pressure that says I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, you are not alone. Elena leans into it for half a second, the way a person leans into a wall when the floor tilts, and then she straightens and walks out the door and into the morning.

• • •

The campus has become a minefield.

Elena discovers this within the first two hundred yards. She steps off the front stoop of her building and turns left toward the humanities quad, the route she has walked a thousand times, and immediately the world begins detonating around her. The bench beside the elm tree—that is where Marcus sat waiting for her one afternoon in October, his sketchbook open on his lap, a pencil behind his ear, and when she appeared at the top of the path he looked up and smiled and the smile was so sudden, so involuntary, that she understood in that instant what it meant to be the reason for someone’s happiness. The drinking fountain near the library steps—that is where he kissed her for the first time, in the rain, both of them laughing and soaked, his hands cold on her face and his mouth warm on hers and the rain running down between them and neither of them caring. The stone wall along the edge of the quad—that is where they sat on the first warm day of spring, sharing a sandwich, their legs dangling, while Marcus explained the structural principles of Gothic cathedrals and Elena pretended to listen while actually watching the way his hands moved when he talked, precise and expressive, the hands of someone who understood that making things was a form of love.

Every surface holds a memory. Every path, every building, every line of sight contains a version of Marcus that she cannot unsee and cannot escape. The campus is three hundred acres of architecture and landscape, and somehow every square foot of it belongs to him. He is in the coffee shop where they met when she was twenty—Brewer’s, the one on Elm Street, where he was sketching floor plans at the narrow counter and she was sketching fabric patterns and their elbows kept bumping and he turned to her and said, with a directness that startled her, “You have a really interesting line,” and she said, “Excuse me?” and he pointed at her sketchbook and said, “Your line work. The way you draw curves. It’s confident,” and she said, “Are you an art critic or just someone who stares at strangers’ notebooks?” and he laughed, and his laugh was the sound of a door opening, and she walked through it without knowing she would never be able to walk back out.

He is in the architecture building, Room 214, where she used to sit in the back of his studio class on Thursday afternoons, watching him work. He would stand at the drafting table with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his forearms braced against the edge, his face drawn into that expression of fierce, total concentration that she had never seen on anyone else—a look that was almost aggressive in its focus, as though the building he was designing had personally challenged him and he intended to win. She would sit with her own sketchbook and pretend to work on textile patterns and instead she would draw him. She had a dozen sketches of Marcus in concentration. The angle of his jaw. The line of his shoulders. The way he bit the inside of his cheek when he was solving a problem. She drew him the way other people kept journals—compulsively, privately, as a record of what mattered most.

She has not been to Room 214 since the silence began. She has not been to Brewer’s. She has not been to the bench, the fountain, the stone wall. She has rerouted her entire daily geography to avoid these places, drawing new paths across the campus the way a river redirects itself around a landslide—not by choice but by necessity, because the original channel is blocked by something too large and too painful to move.

The rerouting is exhausting. She is twenty-two years old, and she is expending more energy on the logistics of avoidance than on any of her coursework. She plans her walking routes the night before, lying in bed with a mental map of the campus, identifying danger zones, calculating alternate paths, factoring in the schedules she memorized during almost three years of loving him—Marcus has Structural Analysis at ten on Tuesdays, which means he will cross the east quad between 9:45 and 9:55; Marcus has lunch at the dining hall on Mondays and Wednesdays, which means the south path is off-limits from noon to one. She holds this information the way a soldier holds the positions of landmines: with precision, with vigilance, and with the constant, grinding awareness that one wrong step will destroy her.

She tells herself she is being practical. She is surviving. This is what surviving looks like.

• • •

She calls him between classes. Standing in the stairwell of Alderman Hall, her back against the cinderblock wall, her phone pressed to her ear so hard the screen leaves a warm rectangle on her cheek. She has chosen this stairwell because it is empty at ten thirty on a Tuesday morning, because the acoustics are terrible and no one lingers here, because she can fall apart in this concrete tube and no one will witness it.

Four rings. The pause. His voicemail.

“Hey, this is Marcus. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

His voice. God, his voice. Low and unhurried and warm, the cadence of a man who has never been in a rush because he trusts that the world will wait for him. She has been hearing this recorded version of Marcus for twenty days, and each time it is simultaneously a gift and a cruelty—proof that he exists, that he is real, that the man who loved her was not a hallucination, followed immediately by the reminder that the real Marcus, the living, breathing, present-tense Marcus, has chosen not to answer.

She hangs up without leaving a message. She has left messages. She has left careful messages and frantic messages and one message at three in the morning that she does not fully remember and is afraid to reconstruct. None of them have been returned. The voicemail box is a well, and she has been throwing coins into it for three weeks, and not a single wish has been granted.

She calls again an hour later. From the bathroom in the student union, this time, locked in a stall with her forehead pressed against the cool metal of the partition. Four rings. The pause. His voice. She hangs up.

She does not know that her own phone has been compromised. She does not know that the device she carries everywhere—in her pocket, on her nightstand, clutched against her chest in bed—has been turned into an instrument of sabotage by the woman she trusts most in the world. The calls she receives from Marcus—and there are many, far more than she has made to him—are rerouted, silenced, deleted before they can register as missed. The texts he sends, desperate and tender and increasingly confused, are intercepted and erased. Her phone, which should be a bridge between two people trying to reach each other across a widening gap, has been converted into a wall. And the wall is invisible, and the architect of the wall sleeps twenty feet away and makes her tea every morning and holds her when she cries.

Elena’s phone has been “acting strange” for weeks. She mentioned it to Sarah on the second day—the calls dropping, the texts arriving hours late, the voicemails that never appear—and Sarah nodded sympathetically and said the campus cell towers had been having problems, that several people in her communications program had complained about the same thing. Elena accepted this explanation the way she accepts most of Sarah’s explanations: immediately, completely, without the faintest tremor of doubt. Because Sarah is her best friend. Because Sarah has no reason to lie. Because the idea that someone you love could systematically dismantle your life while standing beside you, holding your hand, handing you tea, is so fundamentally monstrous that it does not register as a possibility. The mind has no category for it. There is no file in Elena’s mental architecture labeled Things Sarah Might Do to Hurt Me, and so the evidence of Sarah’s betrayal passes through her consciousness like light through glass, visible but ungraspable, there and not there.

• • •

The week unfolds like a long, slow drowning.

Monday. She wakes and reaches for the phone. Nothing. She showers, dresses, eats the food Sarah prepares without tasting it. She goes to class. She takes notes in a handwriting that looks nothing like her own—cramped, shaky, the letters pressed too hard into the paper, as though the act of writing requires a force her hand can barely generate. She calls Marcus at noon. Voicemail. She calls him at four. Voicemail. She comes home and Sarah is there, sitting on the couch with two mugs of tea and a expression of patient, boundless concern, and Elena sits beside her and lets Sarah put an arm around her shoulders and says, “Why won’t he call me back?” and Sarah says, “Honey, I don’t know,” in a voice so convincingly sorrowful that Elena buries her face in Sarah’s shoulder and weeps.

Tuesday. The same. The alarm, the phone, the nothing. Class. The careful avoidance of every place Marcus might be. A call at eleven that goes to voicemail. A call at two that goes to voicemail. A text she spends forty minutes composing—just three sentences, each one rewritten a dozen times, each word weighed and tested and found wanting—that she finally sends and that will never arrive, because Sarah will delete it from the outgoing queue before the server processes it. Elena does not know this. She watches the message leave her phone, watches the blue bar fill from left to right, watches the word Delivered appear beneath her words, and she feels a flicker of hope so bright and so painful that she has to close her eyes.

The text reads: I’m not angry. I just need to understand. Please.

No reply. The delivered receipt is a lie. The message is already gone.

Wednesday. Thursday. The days blur. She stops counting the calls because counting implies that each one is a discrete event, a separate act of reaching out, and the truth is that calling Marcus has become continuous, a background hum, a state of being rather than an action. She calls him the way she breathes—automatically, constantly, without conscious decision. The phone is always in her hand. His contact page is always open. The rhythm of the ring tone has replaced her heartbeat as the most familiar sound in her life: ring, ring, ring, ring, pause, his voice, the beep, the silence.

She begins to notice things about herself that frighten her. She cannot concentrate. She reads the same paragraph four times and cannot extract meaning from it, the words sliding across the surface of her mind like water across glass. She forgets appointments. She misses a meeting with her thesis advisor, a woman she admires and has been trying to impress for two semesters, and does not remember that the meeting existed until the advisor emails her the next day with a tone of polite bewilderment. She loses weight she does not have to lose, her jeans hanging loose at the hips, the hollows beneath her collarbones deepening into shadows.

She is aware, with the part of her mind that remains analytical even inside catastrophe, that she is exhibiting the clinical symptoms of acute grief. She has read about this—the inability to eat, the disrupted sleep, the cognitive impairment, the physical pain that localizes in the chest and radiates outward as though heartbreak is not a metaphor but a diagnosis. She recognizes these symptoms the way a medical student might recognize the signs of a disease she has studied but never expected to contract. The knowledge does not help. Understanding the mechanics of your own disintegration does not slow it down.

Friday. She skips class for the first time in her college career. She stays in bed until noon with the blanket pulled over her head, creating a small, dark tent that smells like unwashed sheets and chamomile and the salt of old tears. Sarah knocks on her door at ten. Elena tells her she is fine, she just needs to sleep, and Sarah says, “Okay, honey. I’m here if you need me,” and the gentleness in her voice is so complete, so perfectly calibrated to the frequency of Elena’s pain, that Elena feels a rush of gratitude so intense it borders on devotion. Whatever else has gone wrong—and everything has gone wrong, everything—at least she has Sarah. At least there is one person who has not disappeared. At least there is one constant, one fixed point, one hand she can hold in the dark.

She does not know that the hand she is holding is the one that pushed her off the cliff.

By the end of the week, she has called Marcus thirty-one times. He has called her forty-seven times. Neither knows about the other’s calls. Somewhere in the architecture of cellular networks and digital infrastructure, their voices have been passing each other like ships in fog, close enough to touch, unable to see, each one crying out into a silence that the other cannot hear.

• • •

Sarah is magnificent in her sympathy. There is no other word for it.

She brings Elena tea every morning and every evening. She sits beside her on the couch and listens to Elena talk about Marcus with a patience that never wavers, never shows the faintest edge of fatigue, never suggests through word or expression that she has heard enough. She holds Elena when she cries, and Elena cries often—not the dramatic, performative weeping of someone seeking attention, but the quiet, grinding, seemingly inexhaustible tears of a person whose body has decided that this is its primary function now, that everything else—eating, sleeping, thinking, living—is secondary to the work of processing this loss.

Sarah says all the right things. She says: You deserve better. She says: He wasn’t who you thought he was. She says: You are going to be okay, I promise you, you are going to get through this. She says these things with the authority of someone who believes them, and the conviction is so complete that Elena never thinks to question its source. It does not occur to her that Sarah’s certainty about Marcus’s character—He wasn’t who you thought he was—is not the conclusion of an impartial observer but the script of a playwright who has written the ending she wants and is now performing it with commitment.

“You gave him two years of your life,” Sarah says one evening, sitting cross-legged on Elena’s bed while Elena lies on her back and stares at the ceiling. “Two years. And he didn’t even have the decency to tell you to your face.” She pauses. “That tells you everything you need to know about who he is, El. Not who you thought he was. Who he actually is.”

Elena turns this over. The logic is clean and terrible. A man who loved her would not have vanished. A man who respected her would have had the conversation, however painful. A man who was who she believed him to be—patient, honest, brave, the man who held her hand in the rain and looked at her like she was the answer to a question he had been asking his whole life—that man would not have simply stopped. The silence, therefore, is evidence. The silence is a verdict. And the verdict is: you were wrong about him. You were wrong about the most important thing you have ever felt, and the wrongness means that your judgment cannot be trusted, and if your judgment cannot be trusted, then what do you have left?

Elena clings to Sarah like a life raft. She does not know—cannot know, is constitutionally incapable of knowing—that Sarah is the one who pushed her into the water. That the life raft and the shipwreck are the same person. That every cup of tea and every held hand and every murmured reassurance is an act of maintenance, a careful tending of the wound to ensure it stays open, stays raw, stays too painful for Elena to do the one thing that would unravel the entire deception: walk across campus and knock on Marcus Sullivan’s door.

• • •

Saturday evening. Day seven. The end of the worst week of Elena Reyes’s life, though she does not yet know that worse weeks are coming—that this is merely the first week of a decade’s worth of weeks, each one slightly less acute than the last but collectively more damaging, the way water does not shatter stone but erodes it, slowly, invisibly, until the shape of the thing is entirely changed.

They are in the kitchen. Elena is sitting at the small table by the window, a plate of pasta in front of her that Sarah made and that Elena is eating with the joyless determination of someone who understands that her body requires fuel even if her mind has no interest in providing it. Sarah is at the counter, pouring herself a glass of wine, her back to Elena, and she is talking about something—a professor, a classmate, something inconsequential, the kind of low-stakes conversational filler that has been their shared language all week, a neutral frequency they can both inhabit without triggering Elena’s tears.

And then, without transition—without the shift in tone or the careful, sympathetic preamble that Elena has come to associate with bad news—Sarah says:

“Oh. I forgot to tell you. I saw Marcus last night.”

Elena’s fork stops between the plate and her mouth. The motion freezes, suspended, the way a film pauses on a single frame before the explosion.

“At that party off campus. The one Kyle was throwing?” Sarah turns from the counter. She is holding her wine glass by the stem, and her expression is careful—not the exaggerated sympathy of someone delivering a prepared blow but the studied casualness of someone making an observation so minor that it barely warrants mention. This is the genius of it, Elena will understand years later: the delivery. Sarah does not sit Elena down. She does not preface the revelation with I have something difficult to tell you. She drops it like a coin into a conversation, as though it has been rattling around in her pocket all day and she only just remembered to spend it.

“He was with someone. A girl. Blonde, kind of pretty.” Sarah sips her wine. The sip is unhurried, almost meditative. “They seemed—I don’t know. Close.”

The kitchen is very quiet. Elena can hear the refrigerator humming. She can hear the tick of the clock above the stove, the one that runs three minutes fast and that she and Sarah have never bothered to fix. She can hear, distantly, the sound of someone’s television through the wall—a laugh track, absurdly cheerful, a burst of recorded joy intruding on the silence like a wrong note in a requiem.

“Did he—” Elena’s voice is very small. She clears her throat. She tries again. “Did he say anything? About me?”

Sarah sets down her glass. She crosses her arms. She looks at Elena with an expression that manages to convey reluctance, compassion, and the particular discomfort of someone forced to deliver a truth they wish they could withhold. It is a masterwork of facial acting. Every muscle is calibrated to a single message: I didn’t want to tell you this.

“I mentioned your name,” Sarah says. “He said—” She pauses, as though the words themselves are difficult, as though repeating them causes her pain. “He said you guys were done. He didn’t want to talk about it. He seemed—annoyed, honestly. Like he couldn’t believe I was even asking.”

Elena sits very still. The fork is still in her hand, suspended in the air, a piece of penne balanced on its tines like something held in the jaws of a trap. She looks at the pasta. She looks at the fork. She sets the fork down. The sound it makes against the plate is small and final and precise, like the click of a lock engaging.

“Okay,” she says.

That is all she says. One word. Two syllables. A word that means I have received this information, and I am still breathing, and I will not fall apart in front of you, not here, not now, not in this kitchen with its humming refrigerator and its too-fast clock and its pasta going cold on the plate. Okay. The smallest, most utilitarian word in the English language. A word that carries nothing and holds everything.

She pushes back from the table. She stands. Her legs are steady, which surprises her—she expected them to buckle, expected some dramatic physical manifestation of the detonation happening inside her, but the body, it turns out, is more resilient than the heart. The body can walk across a room and down a hallway and through a doorway even while the heart is being dismantled bolt by bolt, beam by beam, the entire structure coming down in a controlled demolition that is silent from the outside.

She walks to her bedroom. She closes the door. She does not slam it—slamming would be a kind of communication, a signal, an admission that something has been lost that matters enough to be angry about. She closes it gently, with a soft click, the way you close the door to a room you will not be entering again.

She sits on the edge of her bed. She looks at her hands in her lap. They are shaking, but distantly, as though the tremor belongs to someone else and she is merely observing it. She thinks: he was at a party. She thinks: there was a blonde girl. She thinks: he said it was over, and he was annoyed, and he shrugged, and none of this—none of this—is the man who sat on the rocks at Pemaquid Point and told her he wanted to build a house for her someday, a house near the ocean, with windows wide enough to frame the sunset and a porch where they would grow old together. She thinks: either that man was real and something happened to him, or that man was never real and I loved a ghost.

She does not cry. Not immediately. The pain is too large for tears—it has exceeded the body’s capacity for expression, the way a sound can be too loud to hear, a light too bright to see. She sits on the edge of the bed, in the dark, in the silence, and she feels herself coming apart not with the dramatic violence of shattering glass but with the slow, terrible patience of erosion. Something inside her is being worn away. Something that was built over two years of loving a man who made her feel like the world was a comprehensible place, a place with structure and meaning and a foundation you could trust—that something is dissolving now, grain by grain, like sand pulled back by the tide.

When the tears finally come, they are silent. She has learned how to cry without sound—a skill she acquired in the first days of the breakup and has refined through sheer repetition, the way any skill is refined. She cries with her mouth closed and her jaw clenched and her pillow pressed against her face, and the sobs move through her body in waves that she absorbs the way a building absorbs tremors: by flexing, by giving, by bending in places that were designed to bend so that the whole structure does not collapse.

She breaks apart so quietly that even Sarah, listening on the other side of the wall, does not hear it.

• • •

In the kitchen, Sarah Mitchell stands at the counter with her wine glass in her hand and listens to the silence. She expected crying. She expected the door to slam, or Elena to shout, or some visible, audible eruption of the pain she has just detonated. The silence is worse. The silence means that Elena has gone somewhere beyond the reach of tears, and Sarah, who has been the architect of this moment, who has spent three weeks laying the charges and building the detonation sequence with the patience and precision of a demolition engineer, feels something move through her that she cannot name.

It is not guilt, exactly. It is more like vertigo—the dizzying awareness that she has done something irreversible, that the thing she has destroyed was real and beautiful and once destroyed cannot be rebuilt, and that she is the one who lit the fuse. She takes a sip of wine. She finishes Elena’s pasta, standing at the counter, eating it cold from the plate, because wasting food was how she was raised to recognize sin, and she needs something concrete and manageable to feel bad about.

She washes the dishes. She turns off the kitchen light. She walks to Elena’s door and stands outside it for a long moment, her hand raised to knock, her lips parted around words she has already rehearsed—I’m so sorry, El, he didn’t deserve you, you’re going to be okay. She does not knock. She lowers her hand. She goes to her own room and closes her own door and lies in her own bed and stares at her own ceiling.

On the other side of the wall, Elena stares at hers.

Twenty minutes from now, she will reach for her phone and call Marcus one last time. She will listen to his voicemail greeting—the low, unhurried voice, the voice of a man who trusts the world to wait—and she will not leave a message. She will end the call and place the phone facedown on the nightstand and turn toward the wall, and she will make a decision that she does not recognize as a decision because it feels like the absence of one: she will stop calling. She will stop texting. She will stop reaching across the silence for a man who, as far as she knows, is no longer reaching back.

She will tell herself this is strength. She will tell herself this is dignity. She will tell herself that her mother would be proud of her for refusing to beg.

She will be wrong about all of it. But she will believe it, and the belief will calcify into conviction, and the conviction will harden into the foundation on which she builds the next ten years of her life.

And somewhere across campus, nineteen blocks and a lifetime away, Marcus Sullivan is sitting on his kitchen floor with his phone in his hand and a ring on the counter, calling a woman who will never hear him, leaving messages that will never arrive, building a cathedral of devotion in a void that swallows every word.

Neither of them sleeps. The campus turns slowly beneath the stars. The silence holds.