My mother was waiting in the back of the car.

“Are you finished, sweetheart?”

“Yes, Mom. I’m finished.”

She reached over and took my hand, and did not say anything else, which was its own kind of grace.

As we pulled into traffic my phone buzzed — an unknown number, though I knew at once whose it was. Don’t think you won just because he’s ruined.

You lost Spencer too. I read it once, and blocked the number for good.

Bianca still did not understand the thing it had taken me far too long to learn myself: that losing a man who lies to you, and disrespects you, and blames you for his own failures, and expects you to stay available while he builds a life with someone else, is not a loss at all.

Sometimes it is the precise and only way you get your life back.

And for the first time in three years, as the car carried me home, I was not thinking about Spencer at all.

I was thinking about everything that came next.