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innocent.
    This is why I was determined to open every drawer, look in every pocket, and peek in every peekable corner of the apartment. One of the first places I decided to poke around was the refrigerator. Why was I looking in the refrigerator? I think because I wanted to know what he was eating without me.
    I WANTED TO KNOW WHAT HE WAS EATING WITHOUT ME.
    His birthday had been three days before. But that still didn’t help me understand why there were no fewer than five cakes sitting in the fridge. I lifted the lids of their boxes. They were all really nice cakes. Some were half eaten, but a few had only one or two bites missing. And that’s when a vision began to form in my head, of Pete and his new girlfriend holding hands at some twee Brooklyn bakery, laughing uproariously over the difficulty of deciding which birthday cake to buy. And then I imagined her saying, “Let’s just get all the cakes!” because that’s a manic pixie dream girl thing to say, and then the two of them carrying all these cakes home and taking a few bites of each, still laughing hysterically, before putting the cakes aside and having birthday sex. In my mind, this scene quickly went from being something I imagined might have happened to footage I was watching on a security camera.
    I was certain this was the way it must have occurred. And with this certainty came an overwhelming physical desire to take the remainder of the five cakes and smear them all over his bed and bedroom walls.
    I should say for the record that I am not a violent person, or even someone who particularly likes conflict. I have middle-child syndrome and generally bounce around rooms like a Labrador retriever trying to make sure everyone is okay. But in that moment, the desire to destroy was overwhelming. I wanted to leave frosting all over his sheets and pillowcases so that when he returned from vacation his bed would be teeming with roaches and maggots wiggling in every mattress coil. I wanted him to come home to a room that looked like a scene from The Exorcist .
    I closed my eyes and was able to vividly picture how good it would feel, this release of fury and frosting. But some small part of me was also able to think about the aftermath; about how I would carry that action with me for the rest of my life and it would become some small but definite part of my DNA. About how it would be one of the maybe twenty decisions you make out of your whole life that truly changes something in you.
    I would become someone who had smeared birthday cake all over her ex-boyfriend’s bed.
    For a long time, I stood perfectly still, with a cake in my hand, the surprising heft of it so tempting, trying to control myself, summoning powers of resistance. After about ten minutes, I took a deep breath, returned the cake, and walked away from the refrigerator.
    The search continued, however. I went into the living room, where I went through his backpack and found a copy of a FedEx slip with her name and address on it. He had sent her a gift. Probably something quirky and charming, the kind of thing he used to give me. The kind of thing that led me to have a rubber mouse in a specific sweater pocket for years. The date on the slip indicated he had sent it months ago, while he and I had still been talking about trying to figure things out. The cakes called to me again, like sirens.
    After fifteen minutes, the only thing left to search was the bedroom. I entered slowly, my heart pounding. Papers and clothes were strewn all over the floor. The bed itself was unmade, the sheets and blankets whirled into a spiral, like a NASA photo of a distant galaxy. It felt cosmically incomprehensible, the idea that Pete was sleeping with someone who wasn’t me. This is why what I saw next was so genuinely shocking. You know how you read about people jogging on some nature path and then they see something weird sticking out of the bushes and it turns out to be a foot? That’s what it’s like to find another