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Then she picked it up and said nothing at all, and I knew before she had said a single word that she was running. Because there was a quality to a silence and I knew it was the sound of a woman who had already made up her mind.

“Tell me you are still in that store, little bird,” I said, despite knowing that she wasn’t, not when I could hear the hum of traffic in the background.

“What do you think?” she replied, and my teeth came together hard enough that I heard it echo inside my own skull.

“Here is what I know. My man tells me he can no longer see you. That you have not come out of that store, so you are hiding somewhere inside it. So, I am giving you a chance to come out before he finds you, or have you forgotten my warning about what happens when he touches you?” I had told her, and the threat had been clear. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was also… utterly fucking pointless.

“I haven’t forgotten.” Her tone had said it all, but it no longer mattered. Because at the time I was arrogant enough to believe this meant she understood. It was why the breath went out of me, thinking there it was. Three words, and she was mine again, and it had taken under a minute. But I soon learned it wasn’t that easy, and I learned it the fucking hard way.

“Good. Now tell me where you are hiding, little bird.”

“I’m not hiding.” Those three words floored me. There was a thing that happens in your ears after a bad hit to the head. A ringing under everything, and the world seems one step further off than it should be. That’s what her voice did to me in that moment. Not a fist, not a boot, not a length of pipe.

A woman saying three words down a cell phone.

“You told me I had two choices,” she said, perfectly steady, with not one tremor anywhere in it.

“So, I made a third.” My blood ran cold the second she said it, and whatever came out of me then wasn’t even a word. It was too animalistic for that. I had even closed my eyes as if to try to get hold of myself before forcing out the only fucking thing I needed to know,

“Where are you?”

“I can tell you where I’m not, but then… I think you have already guessed that by now, haven’t you?”

“Anna.” It came out of me in a voice I have used perhaps five times in my life, and every man who has ever heard it is dead.

“I’m not going to be anybody’s good girl,” she stated, surprising me, but it was what she said next that truly rocked me to my core,

“Not yours… Not his… Not anybody’s, not ever again.”

Not his.

Everything else was falling apart around me and that was the part that stayed.

Not his.

Somebody else had done this to her first. She had said it out loud to me without meaning to, and I have not been able to leave it alone since. Then she went quiet for a moment and when she spoke again it was softer this time. She sounded like a woman finally putting down something she had been carrying for a very long way.

“Goodbye, my ghost.”

And then, she hung up on me.

I had stood there with a dead line against my ear and I couldn’t move.

I had been in that place only once before in my life. Standing still in a room, holding something that had already stopped. Understanding a fraction too late that a life had been taken out of the world and was not coming back into it. I had only been a boy then and since that day I had arranged my entire life so that I never feel that way again.

And yet, a woman I had known eight days put me back there with one word.

Goodbye.

Her voice gone and there I was, standing in another man’s office with a phone in my fist as something opened up under my feet.

Goodbye. Such a small, ordinary, well-mannered word. She was even polite about it. Polite, as she walked herself out of my hands and took everything quiet in the world with her. She was gentle with me, and I think even now, that was the part I hadn’t forgiven her for.

That was what she took with her out of that store. Not my money, not my pride, not the endless minutes of hope in finding her. She reached into me and took something I had not known was still in there at all, made it hers, and walked out of that door with it.

And why in the devil’s name did it feel like,

My fucking heart.