But watching five hundred people read it at once, watching the word land on all of them together, I felt the last thread of anything I had ever felt for Rupert Brandt go slack and drop away.

You cannot mourn a man once you have seen, in his own plain words, that he never regarded you as a person at all — only as an obstacle with a signature, a switch to be flipped, a proxy to be neutralized on the way to the thing he actually wanted.

There was a peculiar mercy in the coldness of it.

He had made it very easy to stop loving him.

He had put it in a font.

Cressida turned toward him, and the practiced poise cracked straight down the middle.

“You told me those messages were deleted,” she hissed.

“You swore they were deleted.”

He didn’t answer her.

He grabbed the microphone instead, and I heard the exact register of his voice, the one I knew better than my own, the one that had talked its way out of eight years of small lies.