And watching him weep at my bedside over children he’d helped to kill, I felt the engine stop.

The hope did not shatter dramatically; it simply ran out, all at once, and left a silence so complete it was almost peaceful.

I did not hate him, in that moment.

Hatred would have meant I still wanted something from him.

I wanted nothing.

And wanting nothing from a person you once built your whole heart around is a stranger and lonelier feeling than any hatred, and also, I would learn, a much freer one.

“Emma, please,” he said, coming toward the bed, crying now.