I set my napkin beside my plate and I stood and smoothed my skirt and I said, lightly, that I would just step to the restroom before dessert arrived.

Don’t take too long, my sister-in-law called after me, laughing.

We need you here when the damage arrives.

And the table chuckled, and Derek smiled into his glass without looking up, and I walked out of the alcove and down the carpeted hall.

Nobody noticed me go.

That was the detail I kept returning to afterward — that a woman could rise from the center of a family and walk the length of a restaurant and not one of the people who depended on her thought to wonder where she was going, because the only version of me they tracked was the one with the open purse.

My heels were silent on the pile and my heart was anything but, and somewhere behind me the table was still assembling its old choreography around a seat that, for the first time in two years, was empty.