It was too large to be any single feeling.

It was grief, and it was fury, and beneath both of them, strangest of all, it was a kind of terrible tenderness, because the hand that had written this confession was the same hand I had held while its owner’s fever spiked, the same hand that had moved a bishop to checkmate three nights before it went still forever.

This was the thing I could not resolve, sitting there with the letter, and could not resolve for a long time after: that the man who abandoned me and the man who befriended me were the same man, one person, not two.

It would have been so much easier if they had been separate.