I have been asked, since, whether it was hard to do — to turn and walk the length of a cathedral away from a wedding, under two hundred stares, in a dress that had cost more than I used to make in a year.

And the truth is that it was the easiest thing I have ever done, because by the time I turned around, there was nothing left in the other direction.

People imagine the walk out of a bad marriage as an act of enormous courage, a wrenching away, and sometimes it is.

But there is another version, the version I lived, where the walk is not wrenching at all because the thing you are walking away from has already revealed itself to be empty.

Konstantin had slid a document under our marriage certificate.

In that single gesture he had told me, more honestly than a year of tender concern ever had, precisely what the wedding was: a transaction, and I was the asset being acquired.