Never again.”

She looked at him a moment longer — this man she had loved, once, genuinely, before the loving became a thing she had to do alone while he stood by — and she felt, to her own surprise, no anger at all.

She had expected anger.

She had braced for it in the car the night before, had half wanted it, because anger would at least have been warm, would have meant there was still something live between them to burn.

But standing over him now, with her ring on the table and her daughter asleep on her shoulder, what she felt was only a vast and quiet finality, like the sound a heavy door makes when it settles closed for the last time.

She was not leaving Dane in a rage.