That surprised me.

It turns out that when you stop being furniture, you also, somewhere along the way, stop needing the other person to suffer — the needing was part of the smallness, and I had set the smallness down.

I had imagined, in the first raw days, some scene of reckoning — imagined him understanding, all at once, the size of what he’d thrown away, imagined the look on his face.

But the reckoning, when it came, was nothing I had staged and nothing I even saw.

It was just the plain machinery of consequence turning over, slow and certain, the way it does when you stop putting your own body between a person and the results of his choices.

For twenty-two years I had been that buffer.