That hope is not a small thing to carry.

It is a full-time labor, running underneath everything, coloring every interaction with the anxious question of whether this will be the moment they come around.

And the deep calm that came over me at that phone call was, more than anything, the sound of that hope being set down.

I stopped waiting for Jason to become a man who would not steal from me.

I accepted that he was a man who would.

And the instant I stopped hoping he was someone else, I was free — not happy yet, not healed yet, but free — to act, clearly and without agony, on the truth of who he was.