I have thought a great deal, since, about that small exchange, because I meant the I know completely and it surprised me to mean it.

For a long time I had needed to believe that Spencer had never loved me at all — it is easier, somehow, to have been deceived from the start than to have been loved and then set aside.

But it was not the truth, and I had stopped, by then, needing comfortable untruths.

He had loved me.

The love had simply never been the strongest thing in him, and love that is not the strongest thing in a person will always, eventually, be traded for whatever is.

That is the lesson I carried out of that conference room, and it is the one I would give to any woman still sitting where I sat for eleven years, mistaking the presence of love for its sufficiency.