I know exactly what I’d pack first — not the important things, oddly, but the small ones. The charger. The good pillow. The photo of my grandmother that sits on the nightstand, the one I’d grab even in an actual fire, so of course it’s the first thing my mind reaches for in this quieter, slower kind of emergency too. I know which drawer has the passport. I know I’d wait until he left for work rather than do it while he was home, not out of strategy exactly, just because I don’t think I could hold eye contact through it.

I’ve run this scenario so many times it’s stopped feeling like a hypothetical and started feeling like a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet. What I’d say, or more accurately, what I wouldn’t say, because every version of the conversation I’ve rehearsed ends the same way — me leaving a note instead, because I don’t trust myself to survive watching his face understand what’s happening in real time.

I’ve never gotten further than the driveway in my head. That’s where the rehearsal always stops. Car packed, note written, standing by the door for one more second, and then — nothing. The scene just ends there, unresolved, like my imagination refuses to write what happens after I actually turn the key. I don’t know if that’s fear of the unknown or some quieter admission that I’m not actually going to do it, that this whole elaborate rehearsal is a kind of pressure valve rather than a plan.

I don’t know anymore if I stay because I love him, in the plain, uncomplicated way I used to be able to say that. Or if I stay because rehearsing the leaving has become its own strange comfort, safer than finding out what’s actually on the other side of that driveway. Some nights I think the only thing keeping me here is that I’ve never let the story go far enough to find out.