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But could I expect anything different? Who the fuck was I anyway? Some guy she’d known less than a month?

Sloan was always two steps behind where I was in our relationship. I knew that. But if she could bear losing me, then maybe this really was one-sided. Because if she felt for me even half as much as I felt for her, she could never stomach letting me go.

And she was letting me go.

This wasn’t the same reclusive, grieving woman I’d met on the phone. This woman would meet someone at the gym or at an art gallery opening, and by the time I came back around, she’d be lost to me. I was losing her already.

And there was nothing I could fucking do about it.

We ate dinner at an Italian place and then walked through the promenade toward the pier, dropping into some of the more interesting shops. The trees were lit with twinkle lights now that the sun had gone down. We threw pennies in the fountain and looked at the sculpted hedges. We got ice cream and watched a street performer sing and we dropped fifty bucks in his guitar case. Sloan bought Mom a tea party cookbook.

I tried to enjoy it. I laughed in all the right places and smiled so that it reached my eyes. But all I saw now was the ending.

We stood at a crosswalk on our way to the pier. Sloan hugged me from the side, pressing her cheek into my chest, and I looked down on her horned hoodie and suddenly I wanted to tell her I loved her for the first time, right there, on that busy intersection.

It was nothing like what they show in the movies. No romantic setting, no soft music playing. We had a homeless guy in a muscle shirt holding a Super Big Gulp a foot away from us. Some teenagers took selfies while a guy in a sauce-stained pizzeria apron impatiently pressed the crosswalk button. We weren’t walking on the beach or sitting at the top of a Ferris wheel. She just wrapped her arms around my waist, wearing that stupid fucking outfit, and all I could think was that I loved her.

But now we were breaking up. What was the point in telling her how I felt? To make her feel guilty? Or like she had to say something back that she wasn’t ready to say, or possibly didn’t even feel?

The light turned green, we crossed, and the moment passed, and she probably had no idea it had even happened. But it had happened. And it was going to keep on happening. Every time I looked at her it would happen.

It would happen even when I couldn’t look at her at all.