I had wondered, sometimes, in the worst of those years, what it would take to make me stop.

I had imagined it would be something enormous — some final unforgivable act I would be able to point to.

It turned out to be nothing enormous at all.

It was a slap, one among what would have been many if I’d stayed, no worse in itself than a hundred cruelties I had swallowed before.

What made it different was not the blow.

It was that I was, that afternoon, finally empty.