Freedom came later, and it came not as a feeling but as the absence of one — the morning I noticed that I had gone whole days without thinking of Roman at all, that his name had stopped summoning anything in me, that the envelope from his lawyer produced not a flicker of the old charge in either direction.

The tether had not been cut in the courtroom.

It had, over six unremarkable months of living my own good life, dissolved from disuse, until one morning I reached for the old feeling and found nothing there.

That is the far shore of the bridge I spoke of.

Not the triumph of crossing, but the day you are far enough inland that you can no longer see the water you crossed, or remember, quite, why it once seemed so impossible to leave behind.

Roman is a fact of my past now, like a city I used to live in and rarely think of.