I brought empty boxes, packing tape, and an electric kettle. Denis said his landlord had suddenly thrown him out, and I had a spare kettle and too little suspicion. We had been seeing each other for four months. I did not know his flat because he claimed to share it with an unbearable cousin. When your love for someone is new enough, unbearable seems a perfectly reasonable description of a person you have never met.
On the fourth floor, a woman met me with another kettle. Her hair was wet and a white mark from the wall stained her sleeve. She asked whether I was there to transport things. I said I was the girlfriend. For several moments she looked at my boxes, as though the answer might be printed on their sides. Then she said, 'Apparently I'm the landlord.'
Denis appeared carrying a lamp. I saw the precise moment when he realised he did not have enough free hands for this situation. The woman's name was Melisa. They had lived together for six years, and last night she had told him to leave after he admitted there was someone else. He had not told her the truth about how long we had been together. For her it was two confused weeks. For me he had been single since last winter.
I put the kettle on a step. Denis began saying their relationship had not been real for a long time, that he had not known how to finish it, that things were different with me. Melisa sat on my largest box. The cardboard creaked beneath her. Entirely inappropriately, the sound almost made me laugh. I asked whether she wanted a chair. She said she wanted us to stop carrying his belongings.
So we did. He put the lamp down himself. There was no shared embrace or friendship formed against him. Melisa was hurt by my presence too, although I had not known. I felt like a guest whose host had neglected to mention the house was burning. We exchanged numbers only so we could check any further stories. Denis complained that we were turning him into an enemy. Neither of us answered.
I took my kettle and two boxes home. I left the others in the hallway, empty. A few days later Melisa messaged that he had taken everything. I wrote that I was glad she no longer had to wait. Then I deleted an unfinished sentence about us. There was no us. There were two women who had stopped helping the same man settle comfortably into his life that morning.