It was that one line — his marriage was already over. He had not merely betrayed me.

He had been narrating my funeral to a stranger for six months, telling a twenty-nine-year-old that the wife and the daughter and the twelve years were a finished thing he was tidying up, a formality, a set of papers being drawn.

I was still alive.

I was still packing his lunches and laughing at his jokes and building him a life, and in another part of the city he had been quietly declaring me dead and casting my replacement.

That is a particular kind of erasure, and it is worse, somehow, than being hated.

To be hated is at least to be seen.