My heart pounded in my chest.
Savannah hadn’t gone out by herself in weeks. When she’d tried to return to work two weeks earlier, she’d had a panic attack, and I’d had to pick her up. She wouldn’t have left the house without me, and certainly not without letting me know she was going somewhere.
“Sava—" I stopped when I noticed a single key sitting on top of one of the pillows. The pillows on my side of the bed, closest to the door.
I froze, unable to take another step forward. A ringing sound started in my ears. My mind tried to process what my eyes were taking in, but I couldn’t fully grasp it all.
The key belonged to Savannah. It was her key to our apartment. The apartment we’d lived in, danced in, and even cried in together for the past year. It was small, but we didn’t care. I knew we would eventually move out to something more fitting.
We had plans to move all over the world together, wherever the Air Force would send me.
That was supposed to be our course of action. Together. Every change and twist our life took was to be done side by side.
Somehow, I managed to lift one foot and then the other to stagger over to the bed. My knees gave out, and I slumped onto the bed.
I knew what her lone key on the bed meant.
Savannah abandoned me.
This couldn’t be right. Savannah would never leave me. She’d promised me on the day we married. She was my forever, and I was hers. That was the vow we made to one another.
Nothing would ever tear that apart.
Not my plan to go to the Air Force Academy or hers to go to medical school. Not busy careers. Or parents who continually complained that eighteen was too young to know what we felt.
Refusal washed through my veins as I lifted the key from the pillow and tossed it across the room.
I picked up my phone and dialed Savannah’s cell. A mechanical voice recording informed me the number was no longer in service.
“Fuck that,” I cursed as I refused to accept this reality.
Instead, I raced back into the living room and grabbed my keys. I had every intention of getting my wife back.
* * *
A few weekslater
“What?” I barked at whoever knocked on my door.
“Open the door,” Micah, my older brother, shouted through the door.
“Fuck off,” I yelled back. Instead of going to the door, I picked up the half-empty beer bottle in front of me and chugged it.
I pushed a Styrofoam take-out box onto the carpet, next to an empty pizza box, and kicked my legs up on the couch to settle in for my second nap of the day.
“Open the damn door, or I’ll break this bitch down,” Micah warned.
I belched and griped as I stood up. “What part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you get?” I yelled into Micah’s face after yanking the door open.
“None of it.” He pushed me out of the way, none too gently, and entered my apartment.
Reluctantly, I closed the door behind him and turned. He stood in the center of my dirty apartment, looking around. The expression on his face said it all.
I stared at the blanket hanging on the couch, which had an Ace-sized dip in the middle. Take-out boxes and beer bottles littered the floor and coffee table. The worst part was the bouquet of sunflowers that remained at the center of it all, on the table.
The dried and wilted petals lay on the table with the stems hanging over the vase, begging to be put out of their misery.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away.
