My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

Mostly I felt tired, and grateful, and fierce about the small person holding my hand.

But I felt something settle, too, as it went — the quiet, level feeling of a truth that cannot be argued with, written down at last, where it counts.

People sometimes ask me whether I hate him, and I never quite know how to answer, because the honest answer is stranger and quieter than hate.

What I feel, when I let myself feel anything toward Christopher at all, is a kind of vast and permanent finality — the way you feel about a door that has closed forever, that you have no wish to open, that you are simply, at long last, on the far side of.

I do not lie awake replaying his cruelty.