It had happened quietly, in the back of a private investigator’s office, when a man I had hired to prove my own paranoia wrong slid a folder across a desk and I opened it and saw, in high resolution, the truth I had spent years refusing to look at directly.

And the strange thing, the thing I have never fully been able to explain to anyone, is that I did not fall apart.

I had expected, if this day ever came, to shatter.

Instead, looking at those photographs, I felt something in me go very still, and very clear, and very cold, and I understood that the woman who had spent fifteen years shrinking herself for this man was, in that instant, quietly and permanently gone.

She did not die in grief.