It was not heavy.

It was a few sheets of paper in a thin envelope, and it undid, with a judge’s signature, a thing that had taken up the entire foreground of my life for years, and the lightness of it in my hand taught me something I had not quite believed until that moment: that most of the weight of a bad marriage is not the marriage itself but the daily labor of surviving it, and that labor, the day it ends, simply stops.

For years I had believed that staying quiet was the price of peace.

I had believed that letting Damian take up all the air in a room, letting him treat my stillness as emptiness, was simply what marriage to a man like him cost, and that the alternative was a scene I did not have the stomach for.