The fluorescent lights of gate 14 hummed above my head like they were mocking me.

I checked my phone again. 4:47 p.m. Our flight to Cancun boarded in 13 minutes.

Derek’s last text had come in at 3:52 p.m.

Almost there, babe. Traffic is insane.

And then nothing. 55 minutes of nothing.

I called again, straight to voicemail.

Around me, couples leaned into each other, sharing earbuds, splitting snacks, existing in that easy way that people who are loved get to exist.

I was standing at the gate with two carryons, a garland of silk flowers my maid of honor had tied around my wrist as a joke, and a boarding pass that said Melissa Hartley plus one.

The plus one wasn’t coming.

I knew it the way you know something before you’re willing to say it out loud.

The same way I’d known it eight months ago when he forgot our anniversary and said his phone had died, but his Instagram stories were perfectly alive all evening.

The same way I’d known it six months ago when I found a receipt for a dinner reservation at a place we’d never been to together.

Both times I let him explain.

Both times I believed him, or told myself I did, because the alternative, that I had spent 3 years loving someone who was only half present, was too heavy to carry.

This was the third time, and there would not be a fourth.

A gate agent named Carol, with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and the tired patience of someone who had seen everything, walked over and touched my arm gently.

“Hon, we’re going to start boarding in about 10 minutes. Is your travel companion…?”

“He’s not coming.”

I said the words.

Surprised me. I hadn’t decided to say them. They just fell out flat and certain, like a book sliding off a shelf.

Carol looked at me for a moment. Then she looked to her left.

I followed her gaze.

Sitting against the wall of windows, with the tarmac and the gray October sky behind him, was a man about my age, maybe 30, maybe a little older, with a duffel bag at his feet and his elbows on his knees.

He was staring at his phone the same way I had been staring at mine. His jaw was tight, his boarding pass was folded and refolded in his left hand, a nervous habit, the paper already softening at the creases.

“That young man over there has been sitting like that since before I came on shift,” Carol said, lowering her voice. “His girlfriend was supposed to meet him here. They were eloping. Las Vegas.”

She tilted her head.

“He checked in alone about 40 minutes ago.”

I looked at him again. He hadn’t moved.

The garland on my wrist felt suddenly absurd.

Carol smiled, not unkindly, but with the particular smile of a woman who has stopped pretending the world makes sense and decided to find it funny instead.

“You two ought to just go together.”

She said it like a joke. A small laugh, a shake of her head, and she turned back to her podium.

I don’t know what came over me. I genuinely don’t.

I had spent 3 years being careful and reasonable and giving people the benefit of the doubt, and I was standing in an airport with a garland on my wrist and nowhere to go, and something in me just stopped calculating.

I picked up my carry-on and walked over to him.