The last I heard of him, he was renting a small apartment back in the city and working an entry-level consulting job, living alone in the same kind of silence he had spent eleven years so carefully building for the three of us.

I take no pleasure in reporting it.

But I would be lying if I said the symmetry of it was lost on me.

People sometimes want me to be angrier about him than I am, or more triumphant, and I have never quite been able to give them either.

The truth is that once the shock burned off, Grayson stopped occupying much space in me at all.

I spent so many years organizing my inner life around him — around managing his moods, decoding his excuses, absorbing the disappointment he engineered for my children — that I think I expected his removal to leave an enormous hole.