I felt shame.

A hot, drowning, irrational shame, the shame of a woman who has been discarded and is somehow certain, in the first raw second, that the discarding must say something true about her worth.

That is the cruelest trick of a betrayal like Flynn’s, and I want any woman who reads this to know it, so she can name it faster than I did: the instinct to turn the injury inward, to ask what was wrong with you that made you so easy to sign away.

It is a lie.