It did not.

It felt like retrieval.

I was not losing a home; I was collecting my daughter and myself out of a place that had stopped being one, and carrying us both somewhere we could actually live.

I keep returning, when I think of that afternoon, to how little I actually took.

Two suitcases and a handful of boxes, mostly Hazel’s things.

It turned out that almost nothing in that apartment was truly mine, or truly ours; it was Liam’s furniture and Liam’s life and the accumulated stuff of a marriage that had, I could see now, always been organized around him.