“I signed the divorce papers believing I was a woman who couldn’t give you the thing you wanted,” she said. “I let you go partly because I thought I was doing you a kindness.

That’s the truth I didn’t tell you before I signed. Not a secret about someone else. A secret about myself. That I agreed with the worst thing I believed about me, and I let it decide both our lives.”

I sat with that. The rain filled the quiet.

“I did the same thing,” I said. “I called it your grief and I called it my work and I never once said out loud that I thought it was my fault for not being able to fix you.

Because if it was nobody’s fault, then leaving didn’t make sense. And I needed leaving to make sense.”

She turned to look at me then.