Now they stood with their drinks going warm in their hands and watched the quiet, exhausted woman he had spent two years tearing down take his entire life apart in about three minutes, and not one of them found it funny anymore.

Trent stayed pinned against the stage railing, stripped of his audience, his pride, and the last of the story he had told about himself, watching me go.

I felt no urge to look back at him, and I want to be honest about why, because it is not the reason people expect.

It was not strength, exactly, and it was not that I had stopped feeling anything.

It was that he had, at last, become uninteresting to me.