I did not know this then.

Standing on those steps, I could see only the disaster face of it; the lucky face was invisible, would remain invisible for months.

And that is the thing I most want anyone reading this to take from my story, if they are standing on their own marble steps right now, in the wreckage of something they thought was their whole future: you cannot yet see the other face of what is happening to you.

It is there.

It is almost always there.

But it does not become visible from inside the disaster; it becomes visible only from further down the road you cannot yet imagine walking.

The humiliation is real.

I am not going to tell you it is not real, or that it does not hurt, because it was and it did.

I am only going to tell you, from one year further along than you are, that the face it is showing you now is not the only face it has.

Mine took the better part of a year to turn around.

When it did, I stopped being a woman who had been left at an altar, and became a woman who had been set free at one.

It was the same morning.

It was always, secretly, both.

Chapter 2 — Six Twelve in the Morning