My ex moved out ninety-one days ago, and the only thing that's changed is the cat sleeps on her pillow now.

Not my pillow, not the decorative one she bought that I secretly liked. Her pillow. The one that smelled like her shampoo for about two weeks and then just smelled like Larry, which is to say it smelled like dust and quiet judgment.

I made coffee at 6:14. I make coffee at 6:14 every morning because the machine takes exactly six minutes and I leave at 6:22, which gives me two minutes to drink something too hot while standing at the counter in socks. This is not a personality. This is a schedule. The distinction matters to no one but me.

The apartment looked the same as it did yesterday and the day before that and every day since the door closed. I had not been counting. The calendar had been counting. I just happened to notice.

There was a gap in the spice rack. Third shelf, between the smoked paprika and the thyme. Kat's turmeric. She used it in everything, soups and rice and once, disastrously, in a smoothie that turned the blender permanently yellow. The jar left a clean circle in the dust, a small, clean absence. A footprint in dust..

I hadn't filled the gap. I told myself this was because I don't use turmeric, which was true, and not because the gap was the most accurate portrait of my emotional state that existed in the physical world, which was also true.

Larry stretched on her pillow, yawned, and displayed the full interior of his mouth in a way that suggested he found the morning personally offensive. He was a black Persian with a face that looked like God had started sculpting a cat and then got distracted by something more important. I loved him. He tolerated me. We had an honest relationship.

The parrot hook was still screwed into the wall by the window. Kat's green-and-yellow parrot, Tity, used to hang there in a brass ring, screaming the word "mortgage" at irregular intervals. No one knew why. Tity had never been exposed to financial planning. The hook was empty now, a small brass question mark at the edge of my peripheral vision every time I walked past.

I went to work. I evaluated a commercial lease in Midtown, specifically a fourteen-page sublease agreement with a right-of-first-refusal clause buried in an exhibit that the tenant's lawyer had clearly never read. I found three material discrepancies. My supervisor said "good catch" in a tone that suggested he found competence mildly surprising. I ate lunch at my desk. Turkey on rye. The same turkey on rye I have eaten four days a week for three years because variety in sandwiches has never struck me as a hill worth climbing.

I came home. Fed Larry. He ate with the focused intensity of someone who had been personally wronged by the delay. I sat on the couch and did not turn on the television because the silence had become a kind of furniture, something I'd arranged to my liking without admitting I was arranging anything.

At 8:47 PM, my phone buzzed.

The email had a clean, corporate header. No images. No marketing language. Just a serif font and a sentence that I read twice, then a third time, because certain combinations of words require multiple passes before they register as real.

Dear Mr. Tully, our algorithm predicted the end of your relationship with Katherine Novak 184 days before it occurred. We'd like to offer you a place in our Second Chance Simulation program. Compensation: $400. Duration: 12 sessions. All data anonymized.

Below it, a smaller line: Atheneum Labs. Understanding what went wrong so you don't have to. Four hundred dollars for twelve sessions. Thirty-three dollars and change per hour of emotional excavation. I'd seen worse rates in commercial arbitration clauses.

I read the email a fourth time. Then I deleted it.

I brushed my teeth. Changed into the shirt I sleep in, which is a shirt I bought in 2019 from a store that no longer exists for a concert I barely remember. I got into bed. Larry relocated from her pillow to the foot of the mattress, which was his compromise position between affection and independence.

I picked up my phone. Opened the trash folder.

The email was still there. The number, 184 days, sat in the middle of the screen like a bone in the throat.

They had predicted it. Six months before it happened. Six months before Kat sat on the edge of the bed and said the thing about the living room. Before the quiet that followed. Before the door closed and stayed closed and the parrot hook went bare.

Someone, somewhere, had looked at a dataset and seen the end of us written in numbers I didn't know existed.

I retrieved the email from trash. Put the phone on the nightstand. Larry knocked it off. It hit the floor, and the screen cracked in a thin line that bisected the sender's address, and the email kept glowing through the fracture like it had been waiting for exactly this.

I reached down and picked it up.