“I was getting back onto my own road.

Whatever you lost, you lost by the choices you made when you thought you couldn’t be touched.” He lowered his head.

“I really am sorry for how I treated you.” That was the truest exchange we had in the whole ruin of it, and the hardest thing for him to hear was not the refusal but the indifference behind it — because it took away the one story that might have comforted him, the story where I was a vengeful woman who’d set out to destroy him, which would at least have made him important enough to be a target.

He wanted to have been beaten.

Being beaten is a kind of relationship; it means the other person was thinking about you.

But I hadn’t been.