A short, dismissive laugh. If they survive the cold, fine, he said. If they don’t, it saves me a fortune in child support either way.

I had spent the whole night having pieces of the man I married torn away, one after another.

That laugh took the last of it.

Whatever small, stubborn, foolish part of me had still been holding on to some memory of a person I had loved — some belief that there had once been something real in him — that laugh ended it, cleanly and forever.

There was nothing there.