That was the thing.

Somewhere in that ugly little exchange, in the fluorescent two-in-the-morning light of that waiting room, something deep inside me that had been holding a certain shape for a long time began, very quietly, to change into a different shape, permanently, and I could feel it happening even as it happened, the way you feel a bone reset.

It did not feel like heartbreak, in that moment, though the heartbreak would come later.

It felt more like a kind of terrible clarity, a fog lifting off a landscape I had been squinting at for years.