Do you understand me?”

I switched off the phone.

Not slammed, not thrown — switched off, the way you turn off a lamp you are done reading by.

And I walked toward the gate.

I have thought about that small motion more than any dramatic thing that happened afterward, because it was, in a way, the whole divorce compressed into a single gesture.

For six years, Flynn’s voice on the phone had been a thing that governed me — that could summon me home, reshape my evening, make me doubt what I had seen with my own eyes.

A raised voice from him had always been a weather system I arranged myself around.

And here it was, roaring at me from a hospital corridor, you have nothing without me, the oldest and most frightening of all his sentences, and I discovered that it had simply stopped working.

It did not frighten me.

It did not move me.

It was only noise now, the noise of a man who had just realized the ground was gone and was reaching for the last lever he thought he still owned.

So I turned it off.

Not in fury — fury would have been a kind of engagement, a way of staying in the conversation.

I turned it off the way you set down a book you have finished, without drama, because there was genuinely nothing left in it for me to read.