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And she keeps going.

She tells me about the bus. Route 4, from the corner of Wren to the Goodwill, with a transfer at Main, every fifty minutes. She tells me the post office does carrier pickup if you schedule it the night before, so she won’t need a car for that. She tells me about a used fucking bike that’s sixty dollars from a woman in a Facebook group. She tells me she messaged the grad student about the sublet, and the grad student said probably not but maybe, and if not, there are two rooms near campus on the board at the student center. She tells me about the community college two towns over and their online classes, maybe in the spring. She tells me Paige might want to split something.

She tells me all of it, lying on my chest with her chin on her hands.

I listen to everything she says. She’s thought this entire thing through. I don’t think she missed a single fucking thing.

And I’m not in it. I’m somewhere else in it. I’m a city she flies to. I’m a Thursday-to-Sunday every six weeks. I’m a car she won’t have anymore. She built a whole life for after I’m gone.

“Did you make a fucking spreadsheet?” I say.

She stops. She looks at me.

“Of course I made a spreadsheet,” she says.

“For what?”

“For the fall.”

“For me leaving.”

And she goes quiet.

I sit up. She has to sit up, too, because she was on my chest. She sits back on her heels on the bed in my T-shirt and looks at me. And I can see her face changing. Closing up a little. The way it used to close up in a hallway when she heard me coming.

“You decided we’re doing long distance,” I say.

She looks at me for a second, like I’ve said something else.

“What else would we do?” she says.

And it hits me like a hit I didn’t see coming. Right in the middle. Shoulder-first into the glass.

What else would we do?

She means it. She really fucking means that. She isn’t waiting to see what I’ll say. She genuinely does not know there’s anything else. It didn’t occur to her that there’s something else.

I’m going, and she’s staying. That’s it. That’s the whole world to her. That’s just how it works.

I don’t say anything. I can’t. I’m sitting on her bed with my jaw going, and I can feel the anger come up in me in the heat in my neck.

She sees my face, and she thinks it’s something else. I watch her read it wrong for the first time since I’ve known her.

“If you don’t want to—” she says. Careful. Very quiet. “If you don’t want to do long distance. That’s—I understand. You’re going to be really busy, and it’s a lot, and if you don’t—”

“What?”

She stops.

And I understand what she’s doing. I understand it in my stomach before I understand it anywhere else.

She’s doing it right now. She’s getting there first. She’s saying it for me, so I don’t have to. She’s giving me the out before I ask for one because she’s so sure I’m going to want one that she’d rather hand it to me than wait for me to take it.

“No,” I say. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t fucking break up with me in your head before I’ve said anything.”