And instead, standing there handing a broken man his hundred-dollar bill, I felt the strangest and most complete thing of all, which was simply nothing — the flat, weightless nothing of a man looking at something that no longer has anything to do with him.

And it took me a moment to understand that this nothing was not a failure of feeling.

It was the highest feeling available.

Because rage would have meant Derek still mattered, still had the power to stir me, still occupied a room in my life.

The nothing meant he had been fully evicted, that he had become as significant to me as a stranger passing on the street, which is to say not significant at all.

I had spent months at war with this man.