I.

The freezer in Sarah's apartment had two settings: off and broken. She kept it on broken, which meant ice cream went soft after an hour and frozen pizzas turned into cardboard discs you had to bake at 450 for twenty minutes to make edible.

She bought a frozen pizza anyway. The store had them on sale—two for eight dollars, the kind of deal that made you feel smart until you got home and realized you'd spent eight dollars on something you could have made for two dollars and tasted worse for the effort.

In the parking lot, she noticed the missing taillight on Mark's F-150.

The truck was parked under a flickering fluorescent light, the one that buzzed like an angry insect and had been broken since last spring. The truck itself was held together by rust and optimism—the bumper had fallen off on the driver's side and was dangling by a single bolt, the paint had faded to a colour that existed somewhere between blue and resignation, and the exhaust pipe coughed black smoke every time Mark pressed the accelerator.

Sarah stood next to her Honda and looked at the truck. Mark stood next to the truck, looking at his phone.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"Your light's out."

"Yep."

"Should probably get that fixed before the state inspection."

"Yep."

He didn't look up from his phone. She could tell he was reading something—probably a text from someone who actually cared about his taillights—and felt a pang of something she immediately identified as jealousy and immediately dismissed as absurd.

Jealous of a text message. Of a phone screen. It was pathetic.

"See you around," she said, and walked to her car.

"See you," Mark said.

He didn't ask her to dinner. He didn't ask how her week was. He didn't ask anything. He just got in his truck, started the engine, and drove away, leaving a trail of black smoke and the sound of a dying muffler.

Sarah watched him go. She should have said something. She didn't.

II.

Ryan was the kind of guy who made you laugh and then made you cry in the same conversation.

He laughed loud. Not the polite chuckle of a man who found something mildly amusing—the kind of laugh that filled a room and made other people laugh whether they wanted to or not. Ryan's laugh was infectious in the way a cold is infectious: you caught it whether you wanted to or not.

He also had a habit of appearing at inconvenient moments. Sarah would be trying to watch television and he'd show up on her doorstep with two beers and a story about how his boss had screwed him over. She'd be trying to sleep and he'd call at two in the morning to say he couldn't sleep. She'd be trying to break up with him—which she'd been meaning to do for months—and he'd show up with her favourite chinese food from the place three blocks away and look at her with those dark, earnest eyes and say "you look tired, babe" and she'd feel her resolve dissolve like sugar in hot tea.

"You're impossible," she told him once.

"I'm memorable," he said.

That was the problem. Ryan was memorable. He was also irresponsible, unreliable, and occasionally violent in ways that made Sarah's stomach clench but whose severity she minimized every time. A shove in the kitchen when she'd said the wrong thing. A door slammed hard enough to rattle the pictures. A night where he'd come home drunk and she'd had to spend three hours on the floor of her bedroom with a pillow over her ears, counting to one hundred like she was ten years old again.

After each incident, Ryan would apologize with the sincerity of a man who genuinely believed his own apologies in the moment of making them. "I'm sorry, Sarah. I don't know what came over me. I love you."

She believed him. She always believed him. Because in between the incidents, Ryan was funny and warm and present in a way that Mark never was. Mark showed up when you needed help changing a tire or fixing a leaky faucet. Ryan showed up when you needed to feel alive.

"Mark is the kind of guy who'll help you move," she told her friend Jen once. "Ryan is the kind of guy who'll make you forget you have to move."

"Both good things," Jen said.

"No," Sarah said. "One good thing. One bad thing."

"What's Mark?"

"He's... not bad. He's just not anything."

III.

The Tuesday started like any other Tuesday.

Sarah woke up at seven, drank coffee from a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST DATA ENTRY CLERK (she'd bought it at a garage sale for fifty cents, half-joking, and then drank her coffee in it for six months until the lettering had worn off and it was just a chipped blue mug), went to work, came home, reheated leftover chinese in the broken freezer's non-freezer compartment, and watched television until she fell asleep on the couch.

That Tuesday, at work, her boss told her the company was outsourcing her department to the Philippines. Four people would keep their jobs. Sarah was one of them. The other three would receive severance packages and reference letters and the quiet humiliation of being told that their ten years of loyalty had been worth approximately forty dollars an hour in severance pay.

She went home early. Sat in her car in the parking lot for twenty minutes. Then went inside and sat on the couch and stared at the wall.

The wall was a beige colour that existed specifically to make you feel like you were living in a beige-coloured apartment on a beige-coloured street in a beige-coloured city that had been beige long before you arrived and would remain beige long after you left. Detroit. The city that had learned to stop expecting things from itself.

Sarah sat on the couch and stared at the wall for forty-five minutes. Then she got up and made tea because making tea was something you could do, and doing something was better than not doing anything, and not doing anything felt like losing.

She was standing at the stove, waiting for the kettle, when she noticed something on the refrigerator.

A piece of paper. Yellowed. Tacked up with a magnet shaped like a pizza.

She pulled it down and read it:

Keys under the mat. Take care. — M

Mark's handwriting. Square, careful, the way a man writes when he's been taught that every letter matters because every letter might be the last one someone reads of theirs.

She turned the paper over. Blank.

She turned it back. The words were still there.

Keys under the mat.

She knew what that meant. He'd gone home and checked his door and found his key missing and assumed she'd lost hers and replaced it and left the new one under the mat like he always did when she forgot hers. That was normal. That was what they did. That was what he did.

But he hadn't written this yesterday. Or the day before. This paper was fresh—no yellowing, no creases, no evidence of having been on the fridge for more than a few days.

Which meant he'd written it recently. Very recently. Within the last twenty-four hours.

Which meant he'd been to her apartment. While she was at work. While she was sitting in her car in the parking lot feeling sorry for herself.

He'd come to her apartment and looked around at her beige walls and her broken freezer and her world's okayest mug and decided that was enough. Decided that ten years was enough. Decided that her absence—her quiet, passive, unthinking absence—was a language he was tired of speaking.

The kettle whistled. She didn't turn it off. She just stood there, holding the piece of paper, watching the steam rise and disappear into the air like the last thing you say to someone who will never hear it.

Then she put the paper on the counter and made tea and drank it standing up in the kitchen and didn't sit down for the rest of the day.

IV.

Three days later, Sarah stood in the grocery store looking at frozen pizzas.

Not the same grocery store. A different one. The one on Seven Mile because the one on Eight Mile didn't carry the brand she liked. Small things. Small adjustments. The kind of adjustments that make you realize you've been living on autopilot for a very long time.

She picked up a pizza. Looked at it. Put it back.

It occurred to her, with the suddenness of a punch to the stomach, that she hadn't eaten a proper meal in six months. Not because she couldn't cook. She could cook. She'd learned to cook from Mark—basic things, nothing fancy. Scrambled eggs with cheese. Pasta with marinara from a jar that you improved by adding garlic powder and a splash of cream. Grilled cheese on sourdough bread that you toasted first because grilled cheese is better when the bread is crisp.

He'd taught her all of this over ten years, in the casual way a man teaches someone to fish without saying "I am teaching you to fish." Just: "You know what you need? A garlic powder." And then later: "Try toasting the bread first." And then later still, when she'd made all of these things perfectly: "Not bad, Mitchells. Not bad at all."

Not bad. The highest praise Mark Donovan had ever given her.

She put the pizza in her cart and walked to the dairy aisle. The milk was on sale—two gallons for four dollars. She bought two gallons because one would last her two weeks and two would last her four, and four weeks felt like a achievement.

In the parking lot, she stood by her car and looked at the row of trucks. No F-150. The space where Mark's truck used to park was empty. An empty space looked like any other empty space to Sarah, and that was the problem. It didn't look significant. It didn't look like loss. It just looked like nothing, which was what Mark had become in her life: nothing, except when he was something, and then he'd be there—fixing her sink, bringing her soup when she was sick, sitting on her couch while she cried over something she couldn't name—and then he'd be nothing again.

Until today.

Today he was gone. Not dead. Not gone-gone. Just... gone from her. A specific, particular absence. The absence of Mark Donovan, who had been present in her life for ten years and was now, inexplicably, absent.

Sarah got in her car and sat in the parking lot for a long time. Not twenty minutes this time. Two hours. Maybe three. The sun went down. The parking lot lights came on. A security guard walked by twice and didn't say anything.

When she finally drove home, she made grilled cheese on sourdough bread that she toasted first. It was crispy and golden and the cheese melted perfectly.

She ate it standing up in her kitchen, the way she'd eaten the tea.

It was the best meal she'd had in six months.

It didn't help.