There was no confrontation, no speech, no scene.

It was a series of small taps on a glass screen — cancel, confirm, cancel, confirm — each one no more difficult than paying a bill, except that I was un-paying five years of them all at once.

The whole towering structure of their power over me, the entire apparatus of my supposed indebtedness, turned out to rest on nothing more than my continued willingness to press confirm.

And the moment I stopped, it did not collapse dramatically.

It simply lost its power source and went dark, the way any machine does when you stop feeding it electricity — quietly, completely, and with a kind of anticlimax that told me everything about how false it had all been.

That evening, while I sat safe in my parents’ house with ice on my face, Craig was at a steakhouse in Old Town Scottsdale, holding court in a booth full of the friends he liked to impress, ordering the most expensive things on the menu and waving off the prices.