And I am never going back.

There is one more thing I want to set down, because it is the truest and most important thing I learned, and it is not about Julian at all.

It is about the phrase that kept surfacing in my mind through all of it: if only I had known I was allowed to want it.

Because for two years, the thing that had truly imprisoned me was not Julian’s coldness, or his absences, or even eventually his affair.

It was a belief I carried, so deep I never examined it, that a good woman endures, that leaving was failure, that the measure of my worth was my capacity to hold a marriage together no matter what it cost me, and that to want more, to want out, to want a life that did not require me to shrink, was somehow selfish, or weak, or a betrayal of the vows I had made.