And I didn’t.

The thread was already cut.

I had cut it on the garage floor, in the moment he checked his watch, and everything since had only been the long administrative work of making the world’s paperwork match a fact that was already true.

Sitting across that little table from him, watching him weep, I felt the thing that is more final than anger and more peaceful than forgiveness, which is simple indifference to the fate of someone who used to be at the center of your life.

I did not forgive Christopher, and I did not hate him.

I had arrived, instead, at the quiet far country past both, where a person who once meant everything to you becomes, at last, just a man in a coffee shop whose story is no longer yours to worry about.