He had spent twelve years reducing me to a figure — a dependent, a cost, a woman who should be grateful — and even at the end, even as the reduction collapsed and revealed how wrong it had been, he could not think of me in any other terms.

He didn’t want me back.

He wanted to know what he’d been standing next to all these years without bothering to look.

And that, more than the affair, more than the cruelty, is why I felt no pull at all as I put the phone in my coat and turned toward the gate: you cannot break the heart of a woman by losing her, if you never once knew what you had.

Chapter 14 — Dario