“War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.”

Chelsea looked up from the book in her lap. Her eyes were threatening tears again — hanging heavy and wet and hot in their sockets — and she thought gravity might help stem the tide.

A stray ray of sun ricocheted off her glittered flats and danced along the ceiling as she stared blankly through the dirty window of the train. She caught a fleeting glimpse of a semi-residential street, one of roughly seven million identical streets that Boston seemed to contain: three- and four-decker brownstones framing a narrow road, with maybe a bar or a coffee shop on the corner. This view was snatched away with the sunbeam as the Red Line rumbled back underground after the Charles/MGH stop.

Only three more stops until she could be out of this pitiful city. The sleek, leaping form of the Greyhound Bus logo mocked her from the top of the brochure stashed in front of the back cover. Amtrak was expensive, New York wasn’t getting any cheaper, and if she was going to be visiting Nevin more, then she’d need to sacrifice speed for budget.

At least, that had been her thinking last night.

She read the passage again. “For some, that one taste is enough to break them.” God knew that didn’t describe their relationship. If it had, she would have been out the door the second he showed interest in Boston.

She had read three and a half of these skull-crushing books for him, and between the hundreds of pages of grindingly slow dialogue and seemingly endless journeys, she had begun (against her will, initially) to identify with a few characters.

Sansa, for one. During debates at Nevin’s Cambridge apartment, often raging late into Monday morning after each episode of the Game of Thrones television program, the guys would all claim that Sansa was nothing but an empty-headed fool. Or, in terms less suited to Westeros and more to the dialects of 22-year-old Boston guys, a “dumb slut.”

Chelsea didn’t see that at all. When she read Sansa’s chapters, she felt herself rooting for this misunderstood young girl. Sansa was the least ruthless person in the whole story, and all she wanted was the same thing that every girl wanted, in Chelsea’s opinion: a happily ever after.

“Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in.”

That sounded more like it.

The battles Chelsea and Nevin had fought were never physical, of course. Chelsea almost wished that they had been. A physical fight is so much easier to cite as the source of a broken relationship.

Thinking in terms of Nevin’s favorite series (do I call him “my ex” now? she wondered), Chelsea supposed the long-crumbling relationship that she had staked all of her future plans on had ended less like the battle on the Blackwater, and more like the Red Wedding. There hadn’t been a series of well-defined fights leading up to a climactic, two-sided struggle with a decisive conclusion. Instead, there had been promises made, promises broken, bickering to friends and tongue-wagging behind backs, culminating with an ending so swift and unanticipated that Chelsea still hadn’t spoken a word since walking down Nevin’s front steps two hours ago.

Three years for this. Their final two years of college, unquestionably the two years where a person has the most freedom, had been wasted. Chelsea’s fingers trembled as they pulled a curl of red hair from in front of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear.

You can’t slam a paperback, so she carefully closed the book on the page she had been reading, then slotted the Greyhound packet randomly into the center of the novel.

Her eyes closed and she envisioned herself moving, both in a physical and metaphorical sense, further from Nevin with each passing second.

“Next stop, South Station,” blurted the automated voice. Chelsea breathed out through her nose. Nearly there. She could pick up an Amtrak and be speeding towardsher roommates in Manhattan and all the wine- and ice cream-soaked condolences she could handle in less than a minute.

She opened Nevin’s stupid book to the page she had shoved the bus schedule into and read the first sentence her eyes found.

“I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.”