I laughed out loud, alone in my apartment, and I noticed how light I felt — lighter, holding that silly text, than I had felt in the last two years of a relationship I had thought was my whole future.

I did not yet understand why my heart felt so unburdened.

But somewhere across the city, I would later learn, the marriage that Andrew and Gemma had built on my humiliation was already, quietly, beginning to come apart — while the life I had not even meant to start was beginning, just as quietly, to grow.

Chapter 13 — The Space That Shifted

The next few months were, to my surprise, some of the most peaceful of my adult life.