The Last Goodbye

Marie stood on the balcony of her thirtieth-floor apartment, the city sprawled beneath her like a circuit board of lives she'd never touch. In her hand, she held David's hat—a crushed fedora she should have thrown away three years ago. The brim was stained with something that might have been red wine or might have been blood from the night he walked out and never came back. Not that he'd died. He'd just chosen to live elsewhere.

Her palm still remembered the weight of it, the way she'd pressed it into his hand that last evening. "Keep it," she'd said. "You'll need something to hide behind."

The sunset was bleeding orange across the sky, the same aggressive orange as the construction barriers that had lined their street for six months while they tore down the building where they'd first met. Some developer was putting up luxury condos. Of course they were.

Her phone buzzed. David's name.

She hadn't spoken to him in seven months, not since the divorce papers were signed and he'd asked if she wanted the hat back. She'd said no. She'd lied.

"Hello?"

"Marie." His voice cracked. "I'm getting married."

The orange light caught the rim of the hat. She should feel something. Relief? Anger? Instead, she felt the terrifying calm of finally reaching the edge of the cliff and realizing she'd been living at the bottom all along.

"Congratulations," she said, and meant it. "To who?"

"Someone who doesn't know about the hat." A pause. "Someone who doesn't need to."

Marie laughed, a sharp and unexpected sound. "Then she's smarter than I was."

"Marie—"

"Don't." She opened her palm, let the hat catch the wind. It didn't fall. It hovered, suspended, before choosing to tumble toward the street, toward the strangers below, toward whatever came next. "Don't apologize. Just don't."

The orange faded to gray. Marie watched until the hat disappeared, until the city lights flickered on, until she could no longer remember exactly why she'd been holding on in the first place.