He never called.

He never answered a single one of the letters I did not, in the end, bother to send.

He had filed me away like a settled account, closed and forgotten, and he went home to my father’s company and my inheritance and my bracelet on another woman’s wrist, and he did not think about me again — which was, it would turn out, exactly what I needed him to do.

No one likes a proud woman in a cage. I have turned that sentence over ten thousand times, and I have come to think it reveals everything about why he lost, because it was not just cruelty; it was a confession of how his mind worked, and his mind was his whole undoing.