Tangled Lines

The golden retriever sat by the door, tail thumping a hollow rhythm against the baseboard. He knew. They always knew before the words were spoken.

Maya watched him from where she knelt on the hardwood floor, fingers working at the knot of charging cables behind the television. She'd packed everything else—boxes stacked like tombstones in the hallway—but this tangle of white and black cords refused to separate.

"You're taking the dog?" David's voice came from the doorway. No accusation, just the exhaustion of three years reaching its inevitable conclusion.

"Barnaby was mine before we met. Before this apartment. Before—" She stopped herself. No point rehashing the timeline of their decay. The iphone on the floor beside her lit up with a notification: her sister asking if she needed help moving. She ignored it.

"He likes me better."

"He likes whoever feeds him. That's not love, David. That's opportunism."

"Is that what we were?" He stepped closer, and she saw that he was holding something: the cable to her old noise-canceling headphones, the ones she thought she'd lost months ago. He must have found it behind the nightstand.

Maya stood up, knees popping. The dog's tail stopped thumping.

"We were convenience," she said. "Two people who didn't want to be alone, so we pretended we weren't. We built something that looked like a life from the outside. But inside?" She gestured at the boxes, at the cables still snarled around her ankle like a commitment she couldn't quite escape. "Inside, we were just waiting for the other person to leave first."

David dropped the headphones cable. It coiled on the floor, a white snake accepting defeat.

"I loved you," he said, but it sounded like a question.

Maya looked at her phone again, at the message she couldn't bring herself to answer. At Barnaby, who had resumed his thumping, hopeful as ever that someone—anyone—was about to open the door and take him somewhere.

"I know," she said. "That's why I have to go."