I am not grateful to him for it; I want to be clear about that.

But I am clear-eyed about it.

The strike was the thing that finally made me stop explaining him away, and a woman who stops explaining a man like that away is a woman he has already lost, whether he knows it yet or not.

People ask me sometimes whether I feel bad about how completely Lucan’s life came apart that night — whether taking his future was too much.

I tell them the truth.

I never took his future.