What She Left Behind

The cat had been sitting by the window for three days, watching. It was Elias's cat now, technically—Maya had left behind everything in the apartment when she walked out—but the ginger tomcat still acted like it was waiting for her return. Elias understood the feeling.

He found the hair wrapped around his pinky finger that morning as he was getting dressed: a long, dark strand that had to be hers, despite the fact that she'd been gone for six weeks. He'd cleaned everything. He'd thrown away her toothbrush, her half-empty moisturizer bottles, the coffee mug she'd used every morning. But somehow, her hair kept appearing in his life like a reminder that you can't fully excise someone who lived inside your walls, your bed, your habits.

At work, his assistant noticed him rubbing his palm against his thigh—a nervous tic he'd developed since Maya left.

"You okay, boss?" Sarah asked, her voice tentative.

Elias looked at his hand, the lines crisscrossing his palm like a map he couldn't read anymore. He'd had his palm read once at a beach boardwalk when he was twenty-two. The fortune teller had told him he'd have a great love, the kind that breaks you and remakes you. She hadn't mentioned what happens when that love decides it doesn't want to be remade anymore.

"Fine," Elias said. "Just... thinking."

That night, he sat on the floor with the cat, who finally deigned to approach him. The animal head-butted his hand, demanding attention. Elias ran his fingers through the soft fur, thinking about how small creatures could demand so much, give so little, yet somehow become essential.

"She's not coming back," he told the cat. The cat purred, indifferent to his epiphany.

Elias pulled the strand of hair from his pocket where he'd tucked it, let it catch the lamplight—dark and impossibly fine, like something that could dissolve if he breathed on it wrong. He opened the window, let the wind take it.

Some things you keep. Some things you release. The cat jumped into his lap, and for the first time in weeks, Elias didn't feel like he was waiting for something that wasn't going to happen.