We had been assembled as a merger and we parted as something better than friends — as two people who had witnessed each other choose, at last, to be free.

She went to Seattle and a life that was actually hers.

I stayed and learned to be a father.

Neither of us, I think, would trade the ruin of that marriage for the comfortable prison it would otherwise have been.

Some weddings are best undone.

Ours saved us both by falling apart.