She put a hand over her still-flat stomach, nodded once, and said, in a voice as light as falling snow: “Leave.

From now on you go your way and I go mine.

These children are mine.

They have nothing to do with you.”

What haunts me now is not that she was cruel in that moment — she was not cruel at all — but that she was so completely finished with me, so instantly and totally, that there was no argument left to have.

I had braced for a fight because a fight would have meant she still wanted something from me, and a person you can still disappoint is a person who still has a claim on you.