I arrived at that wedding having finally stopped, and the stopping was its own quiet power, and I think Priscilla felt it in the first second she saw me, because for once in five years she could not find the thing in my face she was used to finding there.

The smallness was gone.

I had left it at home, with my daughter, where it could no longer reach either of us.

The conversation dimmed as I crossed the lawn; people had not expected me to come.

Priscilla reached me first, champagne in hand.

“I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to show your face,” she said.

I looked at the woman I had spent five years trying and failing to please, and I waited to feel the old smallness, and it did not come.

I felt nothing at all.