Five years later, I still wasn’t completely sure what had happened. I knew what everything boiled down to, of course, but the memory of how I got there was so foggy that it usually felt like a story someone else had told me.

I returned home from dinner with Damien, feeling surprisingly good. I had gotten a massive head start on the fifth book, and I knew fans were going to love it. “It’s a complete gamechanger,” I’d told Damien, and we’d clinked our glasses together in excitement of what was to come. “Nobody’s going to be expecting this, but I think they’re going to go crazy for it.”

The last thing I really, vividly remember of that day was stepping through my front door and seeing Paul standing right in the foyer next to a man that, at the time, was totally unfamiliar to me.

The next part was so unreal that, even when I looked back on it years later, I remembered watching it from outside of my body, looking at myself sitting slumped and stunned on my couch while Paul and the mystery man sat side by side on the loveseat with their hands tightly locked together. I watched Paul explain to me that it was over. That was how he said it; “it” was over. He couldn’t even call it by name, wouldn’t even say that he was talking about our relationship. He may as well have been talking about a bad movie that had just wrapped up instead of a years-long committed relationship.

“What do you mean?” I asked him, my mouth so numb and dry I could hardly believe that I could still speak. “Why is it over?”

Paul exchanged a glance with his mystery man, who I would later come to know as Ted. “I’m sorry, Lance,” he said, but he sounded more businesslike than sorry. This was a prepared speech; he was using the same sort of voice he’d used when giving presentations in high school, with the clipped phrasing and the carefully calculated, neutral tone. “I just don’t feel the same way about you anymore. I tried for a long time to deny it, but I can’t force it. I’m not happy here. I’m not happy with you. I’ve found that with someone else now.”

The smile Ted gave Paul and the way he squeezed his hand, trying to support him, wasn’t lost on me.

Still dazed, words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. “You don’t love me anymore.”

Paul cringed, his face temporarily marred with disgusted embarrassment. He was acting like I was throwing myself at him with tears in my eyes instead of just asking questions. He had apparently forgotten that he was not only breaking up with me, but he was doing it without any prior indications of dissatisfaction. Just that morning we’d made breakfast together, humming along to the one radio station we could agree on. We had eaten pancakes before he’d gone off to work. He’d given me a kiss and a smile before he left.

As far as he was concerned, that might as well have happened years ago. The look on his face when he surveyed me was almost entirely pity. If I looked deep into his eyes, I could see the very beginnings of guilt forming there, but he dropped his gaze any time I got too close to that. “Please,” Paul said evenly, “don’t make this harder than it needs to be, Lance.”

I think that was what got to me. I’d laughed, or so Paul would later tell me. I’d laughed without even knowing I was doing it, so hard that tears were streaming down my face as I explained to him that he couldn’t possibly make this any harder on me. It was already as bad as bad could get. “I’ve been in love with you since I was fifteen,” I explained to him, gasping and trying to steady my breathing, “but sure! Let’s not make this hard or anything!”

I said a lot of other things, I know. I don’t remember most of them. The things I do remember were all either plaintive begging or nasty insults. I know Paul said plenty back to me, and so did Ted, but it all started to blur together so quickly.

Somehow I managed to piece together what had happened: Paul and Ted had met at Paul’s job a couple years before, and they’d fallen in love almost instantly. For those two years, they carried out a torrid affair behind my back. Paul seemed hesitant to tell me the reason he was finally ending things with me and absolutely refused to answer any questions about why he’d still seemed so happy with me. I could read between the lines, though, especially in the way Ted wrapped his arm protectively, jealously, invasively around Paul’s shoulders. It was because of Ted, because he wanted for them to officially be together. He’d probably finally told Paul he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too, and that he was just going to have to choose one of us over the other. It turned into an ultimatum: either he goes, or I do.

Somehow, I had lost that contest. It had never occurred to me that could happen, but it did. The only person I’d ever truly loved, the only man I’d ever been with, was turning his back on me. He was done with me.

And I didn’t know how to handle it.

The next moment that I was aware and back in my body, I found myself flat on my back and clutching at my eye, groaning in pain. Ted was standing over me, one hand still balled into a fist. He was yelling, and it took a second for me to take in the words.

“—EVER PULL THAT SHIT AGAIN, I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! YOU HEAR ME?” There was a sharp kick to my side and I gasped, curling around the sudden burst of pain. “DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?!”

“I hear you!” I cried weakly. “I hear you!”

“Ted.” Paul’s voice was sharp. “Sit down.”

Ted was seething. “This fucking guy...”

“I’m not asking.” Paul’s tone was a familiar one, the one he’d started using with me more and more frequently over the course of our relationship. It was the same way he spoke to me whenever I was too afraid to do something simple like drive to the store, or on the days when I couldn’t drag myself out of bed long enough to do the dishes. It was pure impatience and intolerance.

I’d gotten to know that voice too well.

Ted glared down at me for a moment, then moved away. I heard them muttering to each other, then the slamming of the front door. I stayed on the ground, stunned. When Paul sat down beside me, all I could do was look up at him and ask, “What the hell happened?”

“I told you,” he said, soft and patient. “Ted and I have been having a...relationship. I know I should have told you about it, but...”

“No, not that part.” I sat up. My stomach was rolling, and I thought I was going to be sick all over the carpet. The white carpet, I thought dimly. Why did we get white carpet? Paul always said it would collect stains.

“Which part are you asking about?”

I looked up at him. He was like a stranger in that moment. This man I’d known since high school, the one I’d slept beside every night for years, the only human being I’d ever kissed and held and made love with...it didn’t seem like him. The person in front of me was a stranger wearing a familiar face, looking down at me with brown eyes that should have belonged to the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with. The same voice saying these awful words was the one that had soothed me through my lowest lows. It didn’t feel real. I pinched the skin on the inside of my wrist over and over, trying to will the pain to snap me back to reality, but I was still stuck in the monstrous dream where the man I loved, the one I referred to as my husband, was throwing me away.

Paul grabbed my hand and gently guided it away from my wrist. I didn’t fight him. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t anything other than shocked. “What do you want to know, Lance?” he repeated quietly.

I wanted to know a lot of things, but I settled on how I had gotten to the floor.

The question seemed to surprise him, but he answered it anyway. “When we told you that I was moving out, you sort of...snapped,” he explained. “You grabbed me and started yelling. You...” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat. “You begged me not to leave. I told you to let go of me, but you just clung on harder, so Ted shoved you. You took a swing at him, and I guess he felt threatened, so he hit you.” It was clear from his voice he thought the idea of Ted being threatened by me was laughable. I wanted to argue with him about that, but the fact that I was on the floor sort of ruined any point I could try to make in my defense. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “It all happened so fast. I couldn’t stop it.”

I didn’t know which part he was referring to: the fight or the affair. I decided it didn’t matter; the answer would probably be the same either way.

Things moved quickly after that. Paul left with Ted that night. I stayed up all night drinking in my office. When I came to next, half of our shared closet had already been cleared out, and half-packed boxes littered the home that had just become mine instead of ours. People came and went, but I didn’t pay much attention. None of them were Paul, so they didn’t warrant a second glance. Any time someone walked through the door and I saw that it wasn’t him, I was overcome with an irrational anger that blinded me to them. It could have taken days for the movers to get everything out of the house, or maybe it was weeks. I couldn’t tell.

Damien came over after so many of his calls went to voicemail. He brought me to stay at his apartment with him in the city. My first night there, he wordlessly handed me a gin and tonic and sat beside me as we watched old reruns of Will and Grace. It wasn’t until much later I realized he’d gone out of his way to buy alcohol for me; he never drank.

I can’t say how long it took for me to start calling Paul. It started as a rare occurrence, something I did when Damien was out and I knew I could get away with it. I would call just to hear Paul’s voice coming through from the other side. I always thought I would have something to say when he answered, but I never did. Instead, I just hung up as my heart attempted to climb out of my chest, protesting the absurdity of continuing to beat now that Paul was gone.

Over time, the calls became more purposeful. I returned home to find some of his things still there, like boxes of video games stored in his man-cave or sweaters stashed in the closet we used for winter storage. Sometimes, I even called just to talk. He had betrayed me, yes, and maybe I wasn’t ready to really live with that reality, but I didn’t just miss him as a lover; I missed him as a friend. I had known him for so long, passed every day seeing him and speaking to him, that the sudden silence was unnatural. I found myself texting him in-jokes and references without even thinking about it because the impulse was so deeply ingrained in me.

Paul never answered, which meant he also never asked me to stop calling. If he had, I would have. I never would have ignored a request like that, especially not from him. If he had asked me not to call or text, I would have given him the list of his possessions that stayed scattered around my home and never attempted to contact him again. But he didn’t.

So I didn’t stop. Anything of his, I kept just in case he wanted to come back for it. Months passed with me defending the junk he’d left with me from Damien, who wanted to throw them out and be done with it. “He hasn’t told me what to do with it,” I always said. “It’s not right for me to just get rid of it. This stuff isn’t mine to toss out.”

“You weren’t his to toss out either,” Damien reminded me one day. That was the last time he stepped foot inside my home. He was still my best friend, but there was a very clear understanding from that moment forward that he was barred from the manor.

Regardless of how Paul felt about my attempts at communication, Ted was very clear with his displeasure over it. I got calls, texts, email, even letters from him, all commanding me to stop. “He’s not your business anymore,” he repeated over and over. “Just stay away from him. We finally have a life together. He’s finally happy. Just let him have that.”

Just let him have that. I knew what Ted was really trying to say with that: Just let me have him.

I knew things were spiralling out of control. The messages from Ted grew more and more abusive. My manic desperation to have some kind of closure with Paul, any small gesture or acknowledgement of my pain, went unsatisfied. It all came to a head one night when I went out to Ted’s house.

It was a bad plan. I knew that from the beginning. But it was my only option. Paul’s ghost haunted me everywhere I went. I needed to exorcise myself of him. I needed him to release me, once and for all. Hell, at that point, a simple goodbye would have sufficed.

Instead, I ended up being on the other end of Ted’s rage, but this time in person.

I rang the doorbell and my heart soared when it was Paul that answered. We stood looking at each other for a moment, neither of us sure what to say or how to say it. I reached a hand out to touch him, but I thought better of it, hesitated. I stood with my hand outstretched for what seemed like an eternity.

And then, in an instant, I was shoved back. Ted had forced himself between us and half-tossed me off his front porch. He was shaking with anger as I scrambled to my feet. “How could you?” he snarled. “How could you dare to come here, to our home, and try to disrespect us like this? How could you have the nerve to harass us on our own property?!”

My mouth spoke before my brain could catch up. “I don’t know, Ted. How did you have the nerve to sleep with my boyfriend?”

He tackled me, but I was more ready for an assault this time. I’d never been in a real fight before, but I did my best, punching and biting and kicking at whatever part of Ted I could find as we wrestled on the front lawn of his little ranch house. I could dimly hear Paul yelling in the background, but I couldn’t discern any details with the sound of my own blood pounding so loudly in my ears.

The struggle ended with me pinned to the grass, Ted breathing heavily in my ear. “You fucking creep,” he hissed. “You fucking scumbag pervert. What is it you want from him? What do you think he owes you? You should have just left us alone.” His voice broke at that moment, and his grip on me tightened as if he could muscle his way through his pain by hurting me more and more. “You should have just left us alone.”

And then, with sirens in the distance, he climbed off me, staggered towards the small garden at the edge of his lawn, grabbed a rock, and threw it as hard as he could through the window.

I was taken into police custody. This surprised me, especially considering that I knew Ted had hurt me a lot worse than I’d hurt him. I tried telling the officers what happened, even as they loaded me into the back of a cruiser. When they wouldn’t listen, I finally exploded, and I said the one thing I promised I’d never say, the phrase that was the kiss of death for anyone with any level of celebrity: “Don’t you people know who I am?!”

If they knew, I quickly discovered, they didn’t care.

The officers who interrogated me told me I had been arrested for stalking, harassment, and property damage. They had an embarrassingly long list of unanswered texts and calls from Paul’s phone. They had the very few nasty messages I’d left on Ted’s voicemail when I’d had too much to drink. They had pictures of the broken window in Ted’s home and the rock they were convinced I’d thrown. “Why,” one of them asked me, “would a man break his own window? Just because he doesn’t like you?”

When they put it like that, it seemed crazy. Hell, when they put it like that, it was crazy. It was, objectively speaking, an insane thing to do.

I had been in the interrogation room for nearly an hour when another cop knocked on the door, looked at me, and said, “You’re free to go. All charges are being dropped.” He raised an eyebrow, just barely hinting at the unspoken addendum to that sentence: for now. He guided me out of the room and into the lobby.

It was just my luck, of course, that Paul would be standing right in my path.

“You don’t have to tell me I fucked up,” I told him, feeling so helpless and weak that I couldn’t even meet his eyes. “I already know. I should have listened when Ted warned me away. But you don’t need to worry about that anymore. I’ll leave you alone from now on.”

Paul sighed, fiddling with his wristwatch, the way he always did when he was uncomfortable. “Ted overreacted,” he said finally. “He was being a complete dick.”

“You backed him up.” I tried to make it sound more like a statement and less like an accusation.

He nodded slowly. “I did, yeah.”

“Why? Was I really bothering you that damn much? Why couldn’t you just tell me that? You knew—you know—I would never push you like that.”

“I know,” he agreed. “I wasn’t the one who was bothered. I guess I thought...” He shook his head and chuckled, though there was no humor in it. “I guess I thought that maybe, someday, when all of the dust settles, we could be friends. I didn’t want to just cut you off.”

“So instead you thought you would, what, string me along? And then accuse me of stalking you?”

“I didn’t say any of that,” he said quickly. “All of that’s on Ted. And in his defense, he believes almost all of it.”

“Like he believes that I broke your window?”

“Well, no, obviously.” I couldn’t believe he was choosing that moment to get snippy with me. Damien had always called him a selfish prick, but I’d never really seen it until then. “He’s just worried about me. He’s frustrated. He feels like I’m still tied up with you.”

“You don’t answer my calls. You don’t respond to my texts. You won’t even tell me what to do with all the boxes of bullshit you left at home.” My voice was wavering, tears of frustration threatening to fall. “How are you still tied up with me?”

He shrugged. “The hope, I guess,” he murmured. “The hope that we could be all right one day. The fact that I miss being your friend. All that.”

“And you think I don’t miss being your friend, too?”

“I’m sure you do. But you miss a lot more than that. And I don’t.”

Well. That was a punch to the gut, but I couldn’t say he was wrong. “So you decided to just ignore me? Keep me frozen until you could decide what to do with me?”

Paul winced, but he still said, “Yeah, pretty much. And I’m sorry. It was stupid of me to think that could work.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It was.”

We were quiet for a minute. I stared around at the barren lobby. It was empty but for a few stragglers, people sitting quietly in chairs with their hands folded and their heads bowed, waiting to go meet with loved ones who were sitting behind bars.

“So you went along with him. To make him happy,” I said finally. “He told you it was him or me, and you needed to choose.”

“Yes.”

I nodded slowly. “Good for you,” I said, my voice icy. “But next time you throw me under the bus, could you at least give me a warning?”

Paul’s posture sharpened. “You’re not innocent in this, you know.”

“Sorry, but what crimes did I accuse you of?”

“What you did wasn’t okay.” I’d never heard him sound so cold. “You knew it wasn’t okay. All the texts, calls, all that shit. We’re over, and you need to accept that.”

“I just wanted to know what you wanted me to do with your stuff.”

He smiled sadly. “No, Lance, you didn’t.”

I felt heat rising in my cheeks. “No,” I admitted. “Or at least, that wasn’t all it was. But...can you blame me? Really? It was all so sudden. You just left me, Paul. You brought this man into our home, told me we were finished, and then you left.” I thought about bringing up the fact that Ted had punched me in the face, but I didn’t. “I get that this is over for you, and it’s either been over or been almost over for a long time,” saying that made my voice crack, because I couldn’t bear to think about the fact that he’d been cheating on me for two years before any of this even happened, but I persisted, “but it’s not going to be over for me right away. Don’t I deserve closure? Or some kind of goodbye?”

“I can’t tell you what you deserve,” he sighed. “I don’t know. But you have to admit, you’ve been clingy. Even, yeah, a little stalker-ish. And maybe I should have been firmer with you, but...” He made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “Dammit, Lance, I told you it was over. Did you have to make this whole thing so creepy?”

Hearing all that from Ted had hurt, but hearing it from Paul absolutely ripped my heart out. My whole body reacted to the pain so swiftly, so acutely, that I stopped breathing.

We stood, two men who had known each other for a decade and who could no longer recognize a single thing about each other. I spoke first, my mouth numb, my tongue working hard just to form the words I needed to speak.

“Okay. I’ll stop calling. I’ll stop texting. I’ll...I’ll never talk to you again. You and Ted don’t have to worry about me.” I blinked away the mist filming over my eyes; I refused to cry. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“Thank you,” he whispered. “We’ll do the same.”

I knew that was as close to a goodbye as I was going to get. That was the only thing that gave me the strength to turn around and leave.

And that was the last thing we ever said to each other.