I was leaving, fourteen hours later, as myself — which, it turned out, was the one thing that house could not survive.

The fifteen years was not a number I picked at random.

It was the arithmetic of the life I had just escaped, and I did the math in the back of that car with a clarity that felt almost like joy.

Fifteen years was the mortgage we would have signed, the children we would have had, the career I would have set down to keep the house Casper wanted kept, the friends who would have slowly fallen away because his family disapproved of them, the version of me who would have grown smaller year by year until she could not remember having been anything else.

Fifteen years was the length of the sentence I had just commuted to fourteen hours.

And as the driveway shrank in the rear window, with the neighbors gathering on their lawns and Casper standing there in the ruins of his one honest morning, I did not feel the grief I had braced for.