I want to be precise about that nothing, because people hear it and assume I mean numbness, the flat grey shock that follows a catastrophe.

It wasn’t that.

It was more like the silence after a machine that has been running so long you stopped hearing it finally shuts off.

For three years, some engine in me had been running day and night on a single fuel: the hope that Nathan would, eventually, choose me.

That one morning I would wake up and be his wife in more than paperwork, that the space Sabrina occupied in him would close, that the coldness was a phase and the warmth was the truth.

I had organized my whole inner life around that hope without ever admitting it was there.