Page 28 of The Best Part of Breaking Up

My eyes were brimming with tears. Hot, angry tears. I was trembling, as if the anger was coursing through me, aching to break out.

“I thought we were on the same page!” I screeched.

“Yours is the only page!”

He seemed to realize that we were yelling and took a deep breath, the kind that filled him up and left him looking totally deflated on the exhale, as if all the fight had drained out of him. I remember the way his shoulders slumped and how he couldn’t stop looking at the floor.

No, we could salvage this.

“Callum…” I began.

I opened my mouth, but somehow didn’t say anything else. I really didn’t know what more there was to say. There was no way I was going to marry him. My thoughts were racing – forwards and backwards – trying to map exactly how we got here, and exactly where we were headed, to find the combination that would bring us to a comfortably-ever-after. The lines crossed and tangled into a million possibilities, and I was left stranded between them, unsure of which thread would be the one to keep us from unraveling.

“I won’t call you,” he said, with some finality. “That’s what it says, right? What we agreed? A clean break?”

Tears rolled down my face and dripped off my chin as I stood stone still, staring him down. So that was it, then. The ultimatum I hadn’t seen coming. And no matter how much I cared about him – and I really did care about him – I couldn’t bend so we wouldn’t break.

“Yeah,” I rasped, my throat tight and burning. I licked my lips and could taste the salt on them. “Clean break.”

And then he left. And true to his word, he didn’t call.

He removed me from his social media, as we had agreed. I didn’t show up at his brewery. He didn’t show up at the dive bar on the corner for my running group’s post-jog pints. There were no late-night texts to say “I miss you”, no flimsy guise of returning possessions we ran across, no aftershocks of breakup sex, with each wave less significant than the last. We split with surgical precision, but it wasn’t entirely clean. I found myself crying over the grapefruit IPA he left in my fridge, and angrily sobbing over the stubbly beard hair he left on my bar of soap. I always hated when he used my soap. And now I hated him for ruining everything. For being gone.

Sometimes I used to wonder what would have happened if I had just said yes. Maybe we could have had a long engagement. Like, the kind that’s so long your friends start joking about how you’re never really going to get married (are you?) and then eventually they stop bringing it up at all. Maybe I even could have gone along for a little while and talked him out of it later. Or maybe, in some sliver of a parallel universe, I would’ve come around eventually. Maybe one day I would have woken up and wanted nothing more than to be Callum’s wife. But I didn’t. When I followed these scenarios all the way through, they all ended the same way: me, married or almost-married, with that unsteady feeling in my gut like I had betrayed myself to the point that I would never trust myself again.

I didn’t stop dating because of Callum. I dated after him, for close to six months, in a casual string of hookups and dinner dates, but it all felt disingenuous. Eventually, I knew all of them would want more than I was willing to give. And eventually, the whole endeavor lacked passion.

What’s the point of anything if there’s no beating-heart passion?

So yeah, I quit wasting my time and energy on lackluster guys and poured myself into the things that made me feel excited to wake up each morning. You can say I’m obsessed with my work, but at least it keeps my blood pumping. Everybody needs something like that.

Of course, I can’t explain any of this to Kamille. Instead, I shake an excessive amount of chili pepper flakes onto my slice of pizza and take a hot, sweet-and-savory bite.

“We’re doing our best to get along,” I tell her. “It’s what people do in polite society.”

“I thought he was nice,” she reasons.

“Well, we have an – um – agreement,” I say, ignoring that lingering sting. “This case is really important to us.”

“What do you like about your job? It’s just about winning?”

“No.” I smile through a pensive pause. “It’s mostly about helping people. Fighting for them, when they need someone on their side. Standing up for what’s fair. Those things matter.”

She nods. “I want to help people, too. Do you think I could, like, play in an orchestra that helps people? My friend Tasha says she’s going to cure cancer. I don’t know that playing in an orchestra is as important as, ya know, curing cancer or anything.”

“Well, fortunately the world needs music and medicine. It's all important,” I tell her. “As long as you do it for the right reasons.”

“What are the right reasons?”

“Because it…. sets your soul on fire,” I shrug. “Because it lets you shine some light into the world. Makes everything feel a little brighter.”

“Whoa,” she says, slurping down soda from a giant plastic cup with wide-eyed intensity. “That was deep.”

I laugh, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear self-consciously. “We all have our moments.”

“So you think Quentin’s the same as you? Like, that he wants to win the case because that’s his way of making the world better?”

I have to admit that it’s a possibility, one I hadn’t fully considered up until this point, but Quentin’s intentions still feel murky to me. Maybe, like so many people, he wants the prestige of partnership. Maybe he is chasing some sort of manifest destiny. Maybe he’s simply fulfilling a future that was set up for him before he was born. The truth is, I don’t need to know. The less I know about Quentin’s personal motivations, the better. They won’t change the fact that I want to be the one standing in his way.

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