By eleven that morning I was checked into a quiet suite downtown.

I did not waste a second crying.

I sat down at the glass desk, opened my laptop, and called my family’s attorney, Katarina Ellingsen.

The not-crying surprised the staff, I think, and it would have surprised Casper most of all, because in his mind a woman who left him should be devastated, and a devastated woman is a woman who might yet come back.

But I was not devastated, and the difference matters.

Grief is what you feel when you lose something real.