On her way out she looked straight up into the gate camera.

She was not crying.

She did not look like a jilted bride.

She looked like someone furious that the safe had been locked before she could finish emptying it.

There is a particular helplessness in watching, on a small glowing screen, a stranger move through the rooms of your life.

I sat on my sister’s couch in Brooklyn and watched a woman I had almost married open my drawers and climb my stairs and carry out a box of everything I had spent thirty years building, and there was nothing I could do but watch, and the watching taught me something I hadn’t let myself know.

It taught me that the house had never been ours.