The Poem Wasn't for Me

He'd asked me to move in, and I'd said yes the way you say yes when you think you've finally gotten the timing of your life right.

So there I was, on the very first morning, standing in the middle of his living room — *our* living room, I kept correcting myself — surrounded by a fortress of cardboard boxes with my whole life inside them. He'd kissed me goodbye and left for work, telling me to make myself at home, to settle in, that he couldn't wait to come back to me unpacking in his kitchen. It was the kind of morning you want to photograph and keep.

I wanted music while I worked. On a shelf there was one of those old speaker docks with his iPod sitting in it, and I figured a playlist would make the unpacking feel less like a chore, so I tapped it awake.

That's when I noticed the chimes.

Every minute or two, a soft little notification sound. At first I couldn't even tell where it was coming from — I actually walked around the room trying to locate it before I realized it was the iPod itself, lighting up over and over in its dock. Email after email landing, one after another, on a device that was just sitting there singing to an empty room.

Something in my stomach went cold and quiet. I want to be honest: a calmer, more trusting woman would have left it alone. But I've learned to listen to that cold quiet feeling, and that morning it was practically shouting. So I opened it.

I found everything I needed to know in about ninety seconds.

The emails were not subtle. But the one that actually took the air out of my lungs — the one I still see when I close my eyes — was a confirmation receipt. A florist's order, placed *that very day,* for a bouquet. My favorite flowers. The exact ones he knew I loved, that he'd "surprised" me with more than once. Along with them, a little stuffed animal. And attached, typed out in full, a poem.

He was a songwriter. Words were his whole gift, the thing that had made me fall for him in the first place. And there it was, a tender, handwritten-style poem, clearly labored over, full of all his talent — addressed by name to another woman. Sent the same day he'd kissed me goodbye and told me to make myself at home.

I didn't cry. I didn't scream into the empty apartment. I just very calmly started doing in reverse the thing I'd come there to do. I packed my boxes back up, one by one, and carried them down to my car, load after load, until the life I'd been about to build there was sitting in my trunk and back seat again.

Then I called him at work.

I kept my voice light, almost sweet. I told him I just wanted to let him know that his other girl was going to *love* those flowers — they were a fantastic choice, really, excellent taste.

There was a silence, and then the only thing he could think to ask was *how.* How did I find out. Not *I'm sorry.* Not even a denial. Just a frantic demand to know how the truth had reached me — and then, incredibly, an accusation aimed at *her.* He decided, on the spot, that the other woman must have messaged me directly to expose him, because apparently she'd been threatening to do exactly that for a while. In one breath he confirmed everything and revealed he'd been juggling two women who both knew enough to detonate him.

I left while he was still at work. By the time he came home, the boxes were gone, I was gone, and the only thing waiting for him was the speaker dock, right where I'd found it.

That night my phone lit up — and it wasn't an apology. It was a long, furious string of texts calling me every name he could reach for, not for the affair, not for the poem, not for the flowers. For *going through his iPod.*

As if the crime in that apartment had been my curiosity, and not the receipt with another woman's name on it, bought on the morning I moved in.

I blocked him before I finished reading. Easiest unpacking I never had to do.