After My Lover Forgot Me, I Let Him Go

I woke up to the sound of humming.

Not mine.

I lay still for a moment, eyes open, staring at the water stain on the ceiling I'd memorized over six years of mornings. The melody drifted in from the kitchen — low, unhurried, the same half-remembered tune I'd been humming my whole life without ever knowing where I'd picked it up.

Holden was humming it.

I sat up slowly. He was at the stove with his back to me, turning something in the pan. He'd found the eggs. He'd found the spatula in the second drawer, the one that sticks. He was wearing his gray hoodie and a pair of socks that didn't match, and he was humming our song without knowing it was ours.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth.

He didn't hear me get up. I went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet and stood over the sink until my face stopped doing what it was doing. I looked at myself in the mirror. At the photo strip beside it — the four frames, the stolen kiss, me laughing with my eyes closed.

I turned the faucet off and went back out.

'You're up,' he said, without turning around. 'I made eggs. I don't know if you like eggs.'

'I like eggs,' I said.

'Good.' He slid them onto a plate and set it on the counter. Then he paused, spatula still in his hand, and tilted his head slightly. 'I was humming just now.'

'I heard.'

'Do you know that song?'

I pulled out the counter stool and sat down. 'A little.'

He set the spatula down. Turned to look at me. His eyes had that searching quality again — reaching for something just past the edge of what he could see.

'It was already in my head when I woke up,' he said. 'I don't know where it came from.'

I picked up my fork. 'Maybe you heard it somewhere.'

He looked at me for another moment. Then he let it go, the way he'd been letting things go all week — carefully, like setting down something fragile he wasn't sure he had the right to hold.

'Eat,' he said. 'The eggs are getting cold.'

---

He left mid-morning without telling me where he was going.

I noticed the baseball cap missing from the hook by the door. The sunglasses he'd found in the junk drawer — mine, oversized, ridiculous on him — were gone too. I stood in the middle of the apartment and told myself not to panic. Told myself he was fine. Told myself this was fine.

I washed the breakfast dishes. I folded the blanket on the couch. I sat down and picked up my phone and put it back down.

He was gone for forty minutes.

When the door opened, he was carrying a paper-wrapped bundle of gardenias.

I don't know what my face did. I know I turned away fast, toward the window, toward the street below where a woman was walking a dog and a kid was riding a bike and the world was just going on like normal. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

Gardenias. He'd bought me gardenias.

He'd walked past every other flower at that stand — the roses, the lilies, the sunflowers — and his hands had reached for gardenias. The same way they always had. The same flower, every time, for six years, because he'd said once that they smelled like something worth coming home to.

His mind didn't remember that.

His hands did.

'Hey.' His voice was careful behind me. 'Did I do something wrong?'

'No.' I got the word out clean. Turned back around. My eyes were wet. I couldn't do anything about that. 'No, you didn't do anything wrong.'

He looked at me. Then at the flowers in his hands. Something moved across his face — not quite confusion, not quite recognition. Something in between.

'I walked past everything else,' he said slowly. 'I didn't even stop. I just — knew.' He held them out to me. 'Is that strange?'

I took them. The paper was cool and slightly damp. The smell hit me all at once — clean and sweet and unbearable.

'It's not strange,' I said.

I went to find a glass for them before he could see my face again.

---

I didn't know about the photo until Jenna texted me at 2:47 in the afternoon.

She sent a link with no message. Just the link.

I clicked it.

The headline read: HOLDEN ARMSTRONG SPOTTED? Blurry Photo Sparks Frenzy — Mystery Woman in Window Identified as Bellamy Russell.

The photo was grainy. Shot through glass, from the street, with a long lens. You could see the shape of the window frame, the edge of the kitchen counter, the pale blur of the gardenias. And two silhouettes — one standing, one reaching forward, the flowers passing between them.

The comments were already in the thousands.

omg HOLDEN AND BELLAMY I KNEW IT

the way he's giving her flowers??? I'm not okay

they've been together this whole time, calling it

I put my phone face-down on the counter.

Holden was on the couch, reading a paperback he'd found on the shelf — one of mine, a beat-up thriller with a cracked spine. He hadn't looked up.

I stood at the counter and breathed.

The silhouette in that photo was me. My hair, my shoulders, my hands taking those flowers. But the internet had looked at the shape of a woman and filled it in with someone else's face. Someone famous. Someone who made sense in the story they already wanted to tell.

I was invisible even in my own window.

I picked up my phone again. Jenna had sent a second text.

*Wyn. How long do you think this stays contained?*

I stared at the message. Across the room, Holden turned a page. The afternoon light came through the window and fell across his hands, his jaw, the fading bruise along his cheekbone.

I typed back: *I don't know.*

I set the phone down. Went to the stove. Started making something for dinner, because it was the only thing I knew how to do when everything else was slipping.

After a moment, I started to hum.

From the couch, without looking up from his book, Holden hummed the next bar back to me.

Neither of us said anything about it.

The gardenias sat in their glass on the counter, white and still, smelling like something worth coming home to. Outside, the internet was already writing a story about us — getting every single detail wrong — and in here, in this small apartment that the world couldn't quite see into, Holden Armstrong was humming a song he didn't know he knew.

I kept my back to him so he wouldn't see my face.

I kept humming anyway.