I was absolutely stunned. I listened to the gravel fly from under his wheels, and I sat down on the edge of my bed very, very slowly. I tried to focus on real things—the birds chirping, Julia’s purring, the texture of the piping on the edge of the mattress under the fitted sheet. But none of it seemed real. This had to be a nightmare. Max couldn’t have just left, without a word, without an explanation. In shock, I stared at the open, empty drawers of my dresser, at the place where his socks should have been and his boxers and his soft T-shirts. At the little square of space I’d cleared out for his boots and flip-flops. He was gone. He was really gone. I put my hand to my lips, which were trembling, but I was too stunned even to cry. What had I done? What had I said? How could this have happened?

With my knees to my chest, I curled into a ball on the side where he slept, pressing my nose into the place where his head had been, the place that still smelled like him. With my eyes closed and my face against the cotton, I tried to make sense of what had just happened, but I absolutely could not understand it. It was like I’d been watching a movie and had to run out of the theater to pee, making me miss that one important scene. I felt so lost, I felt so confused. One second, he was fine—texting me about something better than donuts, beaming at me as I stood in my nightie out in the yard, then sitting down with my computer to figure out how to save Julia. And then the next second, it was like everything had changed. Like he’d discovered something that…

Oh, no.

I sat up in bed and fumbled to get my phone out of the pocket in my apron. I opened up my mailbox. I scrolled past my daily pollen update and yet another sale from Zulily, why, oh why, and there I found it, the email, which had arrived at 11:02 a.m. I tried to pinpoint when Max had sat down to check on how to get Julia out of the tree. Or what time I’d woken up. Or anything at all. But being with Max was like being in an endless midsummer afternoon—time meant nothing when we were having such fun. An hour took a day. A day took a minute. Everything was jumbled up in a world of long stares and caresses. Time didn’t matter when we’d been so busy falling in love.

But if he’d seen the email before I had, if he knew about the job, and I hadn’t mentioned it…Shit. Shit.

I had to be sure. I needed proof. So I launched myself off the bed and hustled downstairs, with Julia thundering after me like a little buffalo. I grabbed my laptop from the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the couch. Julia assumed her position on the tattered sofa arm. I pecked at my keys to wake it up and then had to enter my password three times because I was so flustered. Maxmat, maxmak, mazmaz. Jesus! Finally, I got it right, and my desktop appeared, with a background photo I’d taken a few days ago of Max kissing Cupcake. I moved my cursor down to the dashboard and saw that unusually for me, all my browsers were closed. I never closed anything, ever. But now it was all tidy and shut. It was the first bit of proof that something must have happened to spook him—normally, he’d leave his stuff open next to mine so that my tabs would read, Which way do the spirals on a snail’s shell go? and How much does a raisin weigh? followed by Mitered bevels oak baseboard and Stihl power drill replacement battery.

But not today. Today, Chrome was closed up like a bad mussel in my proverbial questionable paella. Bad business. Very bad. Half to myself, half to Julia, I said, “Moment of truth.”

I held my breath and opened my browser, guiding my cursor to the History tab. The stupid beach ball waiting thingy spun at me for a while, and I pecked at some more keys. Finally, the list populated. At the top of the first column, I saw it:

How do you get a cat out of a tree?

Time stamp, 11:01 a.m.

My heart took a tumble through my chest. The timing was exactly right. But what had he seen? I pulled my phone from my pocket and sent myself an email. In the subject line, I typed: Please… In the body, I typed out my biggest fear. And then hit the little paper airplane.

A heartbeat later, my computer dinged. The ominous gray box popped up in the corner.

Please…don’t let this be what happened.

But it had.