A woman who closed six-figure marketing deals across a conference table without blinking, who walked into rooms and changed their temperature.

She had not died.

I could feel her in there still — but she was buried under two years of sleeplessness and other people’s needs and a husband’s steady, corrosive contempt, and she had gone very quiet, and I was no longer sure whether she was sleeping or suffocating.

What I did not know yet, standing there, was that she had already begun to wake up.

It only took one more insult, and one receipt, to bring her all the way back.