Here’s one part that doesn’t fit in this story. On the way back from the morning after, when that man and I were walking toward my home, I got halfway down a block before realizing I was alone. I turned and he was stopped at a tree blooming with fragile purple and pink flowers. He was trying to get one off a branch and when he did he handed it to me. I took it the way I took everything he gave me in those months: grateful and embarrassed to want so badly what I knew I would have to give up.

To pick me a flower the morning after hurting me is not the part that doesn’t fit. He was the kind of man who liked himself most for his contradictions, who believed there was meaning to be found in the distance between what kindness and cruelty he was capable of in the same weekend. “I think I would make a great character in a novel,” he often joked in that way people do when their punch lines are the same as their wishes, and he behaved that way, living as though it was up to a reader to figure him out. No, to pick me a flower the morning after hurting me fits into who he was completely. To this day I will still sometimes remember something that he said he loved about me, like the way I would hide part of my face in his pillow some nights, and then be overcome with something that is part shame and part fear. He could remember that, too, anytime he wants. In his memory I am more his than I would have ever let myself be in his life, but not any less than I wanted to be. The part that doesn’t fit about picking me a flower is how long I kept it pressed between the pages of a book. The part that doesn’t fit is how long it took me to throw that dead flower away.