But I had time. Julian had already gone. The apartment was already quiet. And I had begun, without quite admitting it to myself yet, to suspect that the wreckage of my life had not been an accident.

Those five weeks changed me before I ever saw a single file. I would come home from a shift, feed myself something out of a can, and sit at the kitchen table with the drive and whatever tutorial I’d found that week, working at it the way I’d once worked through nursing boards — a little further each night, one small barrier at a time.

There were evenings I nearly threw it in the trash. It would have been easier. I could have gone to a divorce lawyer, signed whatever needed signing, and let the story stand: the burned-out wife whose marriage failed, sad but ordinary, the kind of thing that happens to people.

Everyone I loved already believed that version. It had the enormous comfort of being finished.

But every time I reached for that easier version, I’d remember something small that had never quite fit — a lie of Victoria’s I’d caught and excused, a coincidence that had cost me too much, the particular way my mother had started looking at me over the last three years, like I was a disappointment she’d seen coming.

And I’d sit back down at the table.