The divorce was final six months after the dinner.

He gave up his claim on the apartment and took on the debts himself, and there were no arguments at the end, just two tired people signing the close of a marriage that had drifted too far to bring back.

And I will tell you that signing it felt like nothing I expected.

Not triumph.

Not relief, exactly.

What I felt in that courthouse was grief — clean, quiet grief, for the home we’d pictured, the child we’d planned, the life we had failed to protect from the people who ate it.