But what I felt was not triumph, exactly.

It was something quieter and steadier — the feeling of a scale that had been rigged for years finally being set right, and of no longer having to argue, to anyone, about which of us had been telling the truth.

For two years I had lived inside his version of events, forever on the defensive, forever the unstable ex-wife in a story he narrated better than I could.

And now the story had simply corrected itself, in public, under its own weight, and I was free of the exhausting work of contesting it.

The truth had arrived.

I did not have to carry it anymore.