What I had lost was not real — it was a performance, a two-year film starring a man who did not exist, and you do not grieve a character when the movie ends and the actor takes off the costume.

You just leave the theater.

So I did not sit in that suite and weep for Casper.

There was nothing to weep for; the Casper I might have wept for had never been there.

Instead I did the only thing that was actually mine to do, which was the work: the call to Katarina, the account, the screenshots, the clean methodical dismantling of a thing that had lasted fourteen hours and needed to be made, legally, to have never fully been.

There would be time later for the other feelings — the embarrassment, the anger at myself for not opening the drawer sooner, the strange hollow ache of a wedding album that would never have a second page.