He had bought the tissues, learned the vocabulary, sat through the counseling appointments and said the right careful things.

He had performed the exact devotion I needed, in precisely the moments I needed it, and every gesture of it had been a lie told in the service of keeping me looking the wrong way.

I understood, sitting there, that I was not grieving a marriage.

You cannot grieve a thing that was never there.

I was grieving a performance — a very good one, given nightly for eleven years by a man who had studied me the way he’d studied my father’s signature, until he could reproduce the shape of love well enough to rob me blind inside it.

That was the vertigo.