Rowan laughed.

I heard him laugh at that.

“See?

Mom gets it,” he said.

“Call a cab, you’ll be fine.”

And something in me, some long-strained thing that had been holding on for the sake of the man I’d married and the family I thought we were building, went very quiet and very still, and let go.

I did not beg.

I had been begging, in one way or another, for most of two years, and I heard myself stop.