The Last Call

Margot found the gray hair three weeks after Thomas left—just one, solitary and stubborn, plucked from her temple like a wire pulled from an old radio. She placed it on the nightstand beside her wedding ring, two artifacts from a life that had suddenly, violently unlatched itself from hers.

The apartment felt enormous without him. Or perhaps it had always been this cavernous, their shared routine filling the spaces like insulation. Now the silence had teeth.

Her iphone buzzed at 2 AM, the screen illuminating the bedroom with ghost-blue light. A text from Thomas: 'I forgot to tell you, the cat's vet appointment is Thursday.'

Margot stared at his name in her contacts. Thomas, the man who once held her hair back when she had food poisoning, who danced with her in their underwear to Frank Sinatra, who knew the shape of her fears better than his own. Now reduced to vet appointments and forwarded mail.

The cat, Barnaby, crept onto the bed. He was Thomas's cat originally—a rescue with one ear and trust issues—but in the breakup, Margot had custody. Barnaby butted his head against her hand, purring like a small engine insisting this was still home.

'I know,' she whispered to him. 'I miss him too.'

Her hair was starting to grow out, the pixie cut Thomas had hated finally giving way to something softer, something entirely hers. She'd cut it the week after he moved out, sitting on the bathroom floor with scissors while YouTube tutorials played on her phone. It was an act of violence against herself, or maybe rebirth. She couldn't tell anymore.

The phone buzzed again. Thomas: 'Are you awake?'

Margot's thumb hovered over the screen. She could ignore it. She could block him. She could change her number and move to Portland and become someone who made ceramics and never thought about Thomas's hands or the way he sounded when he was half-asleep.

Instead she typed: 'Yes.'

A minute passed. Then: 'I don't know where to put the things. Your things. They're still in boxes and I keep walking around them and I don't know where anything goes anymore.'

Margot thought about her wedding ring on the nightstand, the single gray hair beside it like an exclamation point. She thought about how she'd spent the past three weeks learning to sleep on her side of the bed, how she'd finally stopped setting two places for breakfast, how she'd deleted his playlist but remembered every song.

'They don't go anywhere,' she wrote. 'That's the point.'

Barnaby curled against her chest, his warmth seeping through the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Outside, the city hummed with other people's loneliness. Margot put the phone on silent and placed it face down on the nightstand, screen dark, possibilities exhausted.

In the morning, she would book the vet appointment. In the morning, she would call her mother and finally admit it was over. In the morning, she would figure out who she was when no one was watching.

Tonight, she buried her face in Barnaby's fur and let herself cry, really cry, for the first time since the door closed behind Thomas. The cat purred against her cheek, his rough tongue catching her tears, patient as a heartbeat, certain that morning would come again.