There is not much to say about the building. Two stories. Shaped like an L. Siding painted Atlantic Ocean gray and each identical apartment door painted a dour winter blue. I was eighteen. He was twenty-four. We held hands. We were in the kind of love people only are when they just don’t know any better.

The lady apartment manager walked ahead of us. Her blue bathrobe wrapped tight around her body. We walked up the uncovered outdoor stairs, slabs of concrete, metal handrails. Our feet on the steps rang loud, hollow, loud.

“Here,” the manager said, pointing at a blue door. Her dyed black hair was tossed around by the wind, gray roots. “Two seventeen.”

He grabbed my arm and slung it around his waist. He poked his fingers into my side, a wicked smile opened his face, which I knew meant he wanted the apartment no matter what it looked like because seventeen was his lucky number. We’d already planned to hold our wedding on the seventeenth day of some month between now and the end of next year. He had lined up a job delivering pizza and I was going to enroll in the community college one town over. We were going to wait to have kids until we’d done some travelling. Everything was all figured out.

The view from the second-story front door was a parking lot, a McDonald’s across the street, two gas stations, and an all-night diner. The freeway was pretty close—two streets over past the Motel 6 and the Super 8—and because it was almost always raining, after living there for a while, I’d start to confuse the sound of the cars rushing over wet asphalt with the ocean.

The manager pulled a key ring from the pocket of her bathrobe and a used tissue fell out. No one picked it up. She knocked as if there might be someone inside and then unlocked the door and walked in.

He dropped his arm from my waist and walked in ahead of me.

“We don’t pay electric,” the manager said, “but everything else is included. One-year lease. No exceptions.”

I walked through the doorway into the apartment.

A tidy beige corner kitchen opened onto a small living room with long vertical blinds in front of a sliding glass door out onto a wet wood balcony with a view of someone else’s balcony and the laundry room below.

The smell was bleach and mildew, like the place had been cleaned with a used, dirty rag.

The sliding glass door was the only source of natural light in the room. Not yet, but much later, I would imagine shoving him through those sliding doors, imagine the broken glass bursting to life in slow motion as he flew through, each shard digging into his skin and making a precise, painful tear, like claws on prey. But as I said, that was much later.

The manager walked ahead of us, turning lights on.

She said, “The bedroom’s got brand-new carpet and closet doors.”

The bedroom was a square box with room for a bed and a dresser and had a window big enough to climb out of. The brand-new carpet was not a selling point. Coffee-stain brown and probably rough on bare knees. And the new closet doors meant to me the previous tenant probably threw a fist through the old ones. The whole place reeked of violence.

He was buzzing through the apartment, feet moving fast as he opened closets and cabinets. I could almost hear his brain working, like an engine revved up high, planning every detail of our lives.

Next to the bedroom was a small bathroom. Linoleum. Fluorescent light. Low sink. I walked across the threshold and stuck my head around the rippled glass shower doors to inspect the tub. Clean. Above the bathroom sink was a medicine cabinet and I saw myself in the mirror there. I lifted my hands to part my short, dark hair precisely down the middle as I preferred it and my left hand flashed in the light—the little diamond set on a thin gold band.

Everything about the ring was still unfamiliar to me. I did not like gold or diamonds or any kind of flash. I’d never told him that. It was something I expected he’d notice on his own. But when he held open the little black velvet box and knelt in my parents’ doorway asking if I’d marry him, I knew I needed to wear the ring no matter what I liked, no matter what thoughts crashed through my mind at the sight of it, thoughts like It’s possible he doesn’t know me at all.

When I saw it flash in the bathroom mirror, I rotated the gold band around so the diamond faced the inside of my hand. The jewel embarrassed me. I hid it from sight whenever possible.

Later, much later, when I would return the ring to him and explain that I still loved him but didn’t want to be engaged anymore, he would tell me to keep the ring, assuming, I suppose, that I would change my mind back again and marry him like I said I would. The little diamond on its gold band lived on my dresser in its true home, the black velvet box, top snapped shut, until a couple months later when I finally told him that I didn’t love him anymore and I couldn’t be his girlfriend and he should take the ring back for the next girl.

His face appeared in the mirror next to mine. His body pushed against me.

He said, “I can picture having a beer here.” He stuck his hand between my legs and smiled. “You like it?”

I hated the place, shitty neighborhood, no real light, that fucking carpet, but I loved him and I was young and understood that meant giving him everything he wanted.

We moved in the next day.

