One week and three days after their fight, Phil returns to the apartment. He needs more weather-appropriate clothing than what he hurriedly packed, and he's hoping that upon seeing him, Dan will apologise and beg him to stay. Phil's heart races and his stomach forces itself up and into the back of his throat as he approaches the front door of the apartment. He unlocks the door with his key and enters, noticing that Dan hasn't cleaned up at all since their fight. There is broken glass all over the floor and one of the house plants that got knocked over in Phil's rage is half-dead. He rights it and does his best to put the plant back in the pot properly before heading to the living room.
Upon seeing no sign of Dan, Phil checks Dan's room and the office but he is nowhere to be found.
'Odd,' he thinks, 'I wonder where he could be?' Any confusion as to where Dan is dissipates immediately when Phil enters his own room. Phil's pillow and quilt are covered in so much blood. He pales and feels queasy at the sight of it before panic sets in at the realisation that it must be Dan's blood. He shuffles toward the bed, terrified of what he will see on the other side. As he peers over his blood-stained bed, Phil expects the worst. He expects to see Dan's lifeless body lying on the floor but instead, all he sees is a bloodied knife. Confused, but no longer fearing for Dan's life, Phil begins to grab what he needs.
It is with a sickening feeling while packing his clothes that Phil solves the mystery of the knife and all the blood. Phil wants to vomit when he realises what Dan has been doing to himself, the thought that anyone could do that repulses him so much that any hope of Dan returning and begging him to stay is pushed from his mind. He no longer wants anything to do with the weak, broken person who lives here. It is with this thought that Phil hurries to leave the apartment as soon as he can, leaving everything how he found it in the hopes that Dan will never know he'd been there.
Dan wakes up on the tenth morning of Phil staying elsewhere and the seventh morning he has woken in a pool of dried blood on Phil's bed. He goes to the kitchen, looking for food, only to realise he's finally run out and will have to leave the apartment. Fortunately, it is cold out and he can hide his arm from prying eyes with long sleeves without seeming suspicious, which is exactly what he does before heading out the front door, locking it behind him. Shopping is so normal, so domestic, that he can't help but think of the thousand times he'd done it with Phil and it is all he can do to hold in his tears as he breaks down in the cereal aisle.
Finally, Dan returns to the apartment building. As he walks up to the front door, Dan sees someone further down the pavement that looks so much like Phil that the tears finally force their way out. Dan begins the long and tiring journey up the stairs and, upon reaching the door to his apartment, fumbles with his keys before inserting them into the lock. He goes inside and pack the shopping away, thinking the whole time that something isn't right. He just doesn't know what.
As Dan is walking towards Phil's room, glass of cereal in hand, he realises. The door was unlocked when he came in. Someone is in the apartment. With that realisation, Dan notices a pot plant that was knocked over during Phil's rampage has been stood up. Someone has definitely been here. He looks around the apartment and finds nobody, eventually settling in Phil's room as planned, still puzzled. As he sits there, drinking his cereal and surveying the room, Dan notices that Phil's jumper drawer is ajar when he is certain it wasn't this morning.
'Phil was here,' he says to nobody in particular, 'Phil was here getting warm clothes and I missed him,' followed by, 'Actually, I'm glad. I didn't want to see him anyway. Not after what he did.'
Dan finishes drinking his cereal and passes out on Phil's bed. The trip to the shops was exhausting in his current emotional state, as well as the thought of how close he'd come to seeing Phil, and Dan has no energy left for anything.
