She put the key into the hole and turned the lock. She nudged the door open with her shoulder. She walked into a silent apartment, and immediately, she knew something was wrong.

The first thing she smelled was Chinese food, and she looked over to her left at her loft-style apartment and saw open containers sitting on the coffee table next to a pair of used plates and two empty wineglasses. When she moved closer, she saw one of the glasses was smeared with lipstick. One of Chuck’s shirts was tossed haphazardly on the floor.

She looked slowly to her right, toward the rear of the apartment, her open bedroom area, her stomach churning so hard she thought she might throw up. She had known him a year and a half. When they first met, he was a high-flying software entrepreneur, about to sell his company to one of the giants for an obscene amount of cash. He was magnetic and charismatic and justifiably confident. It took him about an hour to have her completely charmed.

Then the sale fell through. His company washed out in the receding high-tech tide. He went from expectations of a hundred million dollars to barely having bus fare, so he moved out of his penthouse apartment and came to live with her.

He’d get up every morning, read the papers from front to back, then sit at her computer in the bay window and plot out the next big thing. She went off to her sometimes grinding job as a government lawyer. It wasn’t great, but it was a life. They were due to be married in six more months.

As she walked toward the back of the apartment, she heard her cat, Hercules, crying for help. Someone, she saw to her disgust, had shut him inside his tiny airline carrier. She looked at the rumpled bed, at the shoes — men’s and women’s — that were tossed haphazardly around it, at the clothing that littered the hardwood floor.