Every shared streaming account, every cloud login, every shopping app with one-click access, every digital foothold he still had into my life: changed, revoked, blocked, severed.
Click. Remove. Delete. Confirm.
The deed to the house had always been mine. I bought it three years before I met him, after seven years of working myself into the ground at a corporate consulting job I hated, then parlaying that salary into a better position at a healthcare operations firm where I learned how to negotiate, budget, and stop apologizing for competence. Ethan moved into a life I had already built. The equity, the mortgage, the insurance, the title—my name.
The main accounts? Mine too.
What Ethan had, in practical terms, was access.
I removed it.
At 3:30, I called a twenty-four-hour locksmith.
The man answered sounding as though I had dragged him from sleep by the ankle. “Emergency lock change?”
“Yes,” I said.
There was a pause. “This late?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. “We can do an early morning slot.”
“I’ll pay double if you come now.”
Silence again, but this time the silence of a man doing quick math.
“Text me the address.”
By four o’clock, headlights cut across the front windows in white bands, and the locksmith’s van rolled into the driveway.
He was in his late fifties, gray mustache, thermal hoodie under a work jacket, the expression of someone who had seen enough people in some version of crisis to know not to ask more than necessary. He hauled his kit up the walkway while I stood in the doorway barefoot in an old college sweatshirt and leggings, my hair still tangled from sleeping on the couch.
“Long night?” he asked.
Instead of answering, I held up my phone.
He read the text. His eyebrows went up. Then he let out a low whistle that was somehow sympathetic without being theatrical.
“Well,” he said, “that’s one way to find out you need new locks.”
It was the closest thing to humor I could have tolerated, and somehow it steadied me.