I set the paper down and let out a slow breath, and I almost smiled, because of all the things Luca never understood about me, this was the last and the most telling.

He thought closure was a conversation.

He thought it was an explanation offered across a cafe table, an apology, a final scene in which he got to say his piece and I got to absorb it, and we both walked away with the matter somehow resolved between us.

He wanted closure the way he had wanted everything in our marriage — as a thing I would provide him, on request, at my own expense.

And he could not comprehend that closure was not something he had the power to give me, because I had already taken it, months before, entirely for myself.