She left on a Sunday.
The moving truck came at nine in the morning for the remaining boxes. He helped load it, working in the cool September morning air with the two movers, who were professionals in the purest sense — efficient, impersonal, uninterested in the emotional content of what they were moving. He was glad for their indifference. It made the loading feel practical rather than terminal.
After the truck left, there was a half-hour before she needed to go. They stood in the empty apartment — no furniture now, nothing left but the bare walls and the two of them — and she did a final walk-through, the ritual she had clearly done before, in other departures. She checked the bathroom and the kitchen and the bedroom, not looking for anything she'd forgotten (she had been too careful for that) but simply completing the leave-taking, saying goodbye to the rooms.
He stood in the living room and waited.
She came back and stood in front of him and looked at him with the clear, accepting attention that was the thing he would miss most — more than her voice, more than her presence in the apartment, more even than the Sunday dinners. The quality of her looking.
'I have something for you,' she said. She went to her bag and came back with a small notebook — not the one she always carried, but a different one, its cover dark blue. She put it in his hands.
'It's my listening journal,' she said. 'I've been keeping it for six years. Every piece of music I heard that mattered to me, what I was doing, what I thought. Some of it is notes for compositions. Some of it is just — being a person listening to things.' She paused. 'I want you to have it. Not forever. For the year. Read it when you want to. It's what I sound like on the inside.'
He held the notebook carefully, the way he had held her scores. 'Thank you,' he said, which was not adequate and was all he had.
'Also,' she said, 'in October, when the premiere is — I want you to come. Not as — not to resolve anything. Just to hear it. Just to be there.'
'I'll be there,' he said.
She nodded. She picked up her bag. She looked at him one more time — that long, complete, unhurried look.
'Eliot,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
He kissed her in the empty room of her empty apartment, and he put everything into it — the year, the faculty lounge, the November rain, the coast, the elegy's fifth movement, the Sunday dinners, the knocked-on doors, all of it.
She kissed him back the same way.