I only had to stop protecting him from the shape of his own life.

That was the whole of my revenge, if you can call it that, and I don’t think you can: I put down the eraser, and let him be seen as clearly as he had failed to see me.

Chapter 10 — The Small Apartment

I took a one-bedroom apartment near the botanical gardens, which I had looked at once, months before, in secret, the way you look at a life you don’t believe you’re allowed to want.

It was small and plain and full of light, and it was the first space in my adult existence that was arranged entirely around one person’s actual pleasures, which were, I discovered, still in there after all those years, a little dusty but intact.

I put my reading chair by the window that got the morning.