She hadn’t gone silent.

I had made myself unreachable, brick by brick, and then congratulated myself on the peace of the resulting silence.

There is a kind of running away that disguises itself perfectly as strength, and I was fluent in it.

Everything I did to feel strong after the divorce was, I can see now, just a more sophisticated way of refusing to face anything — and the bill for all that refusing came due in a small living room on the West Side, with two children calling me “sir.”

“I emailed your personal account.”

Which I had abandoned the month I moved to Canada, wanting nothing that could reach backward.