That love did not vanish the instant I saw the necklace; love is not that obedient.

Some part of me went on grieving the man I had thought he was even while the rest of me was building the case against the man he actually was, and I learned, in those weeks, that you can do both at once, that a woman is large enough to hold a broken heart in one hand and a strategy in the other.

But here is the thing I discovered, the thing I would tell any woman standing where I stood: the grief and the purpose are not enemies.

The purpose is what you do with the grief so that it does not do something worse with you.