He had not asked whether she wanted it back, or what the watch had meant to her when she chose it, or whether the lie he’d told about it had cost her something to hear repeated at dinner party after dinner party for eight years.

He had made even the return of her own gift into a question about his feelings.

And she had handed it back to him anyway — not out of generosity, and not out of weakness, but because she genuinely no longer needed it to mean anything.

A trophy would have kept him important.

A punishment would have kept him important.

Handing it back and feeling nothing was the only response that let him become, finally, what she needed him to be: a person from her past, holding an expensive watch, standing in a kitchen that was no longer arranged around making him look larger than he was.