There is a specific loneliness to waiting to be proven innocent of something you did not do.

It is not the same as ordinary waiting.

Every hour, some part of your mind rehearses the verdict, and even though you know the truth, the machinery of doubt that has been installed around you does its work anyway.

I found myself, in the small hours, doing an obscene arithmetic — going back over the calendar, over Fabian’s visits, over every coffee at the kitchen island, not because I doubted myself for one second but because Matthias’s certainty was a kind of gravity, and gravity pulls on you whether or not you agree with it.

I hated him for that most of all, I think.

Not for the leaving, though the leaving was cruel.