I slept well because a weight had come off me that was far heavier than the house, and I had been carrying it for so long that I had stopped noticing its weight until it lifted.

The weight was the low, constant, background labor of pretending — of pretending that Wendy hosting in my dining room was a joy rather than a theft, that Stephanie’s portraits in my foyer were sweet rather than presumptuous, that my husband calling my life’s work his compound was charming rather than a warning.

For years I had held all of that pretending up, the way you hold up a smile at a party you want to leave, and the effort of it had become so constant that it felt like simply the texture of being alive.

And the night I signed that paper, the pretending ended.