The gap on that sheet of paper, the chasm no amount of night shifts could ever have crossed, had simply closed, the way a nightmare closes when you wake.

There was a vertigo in it that I had not expected, a strange grief mixed in with the overwhelming relief.

For a year that number had been the shape of my whole life, the thing I woke to and slept beside and carried through every waking hour, and now, in a single morning, it was simply gone, dissolved by a wire transfer, and I hardly knew what to do with the space it left.

It is a peculiar thing about a long fear, that even its lifting can disorient you, that you can stand in the sudden absence of a dread you have lived inside for so long and feel, for a moment, almost lost without it.