There is a specific relief in that, once you stop grieving the closeness you were never actually going to get.

You are released from the exhausting work of auditioning for an affection that was always going to be conditional, and you are free, at last, to simply be courteous, which costs nothing and asks for nothing back.

Chapter 24 — The Bill, the Second Time

The meal was good.

I had braced for an ambush all evening and the ambush never came, and somewhere around the main course I felt my shoulders come down from around my ears where they had lived, at family dinners, for the better part of two years.

That is the part nobody warns you about when you set a boundary — that once the extraction stops, the gatherings can actually be pleasant, that the people who drained you are often perfectly good company the moment they are no longer draining you.