I did not have to heal from loving Victor, because there had never been a real Victor to love.

I only had to heal from the cold, and from the fear, and from the eight years I’d spent as an audience to a performance I mistook for a marriage.

And that healing, it turned out, was faster and cleaner than I had any right to expect — because you recover much more quickly from a lie you’ve stopped believing than from a love you’ve genuinely lost.

The clarity was a cruelty in the moment.