I took back my maiden name — Marceline Somerville.

I went back to the university to teach a graduate finance seminar, and stood frozen outside the lecture hall for a long minute, because Devon had spent years convincing me my degree was a worthless piece of paper and that he understood the world and I did not.

After my first lecture a student came up and told me she’d never understood the material so clearly.

I cried in the faculty bathroom, but not the way I used to cry.

I sold the house in Oak Brook — I didn’t want one room of a place where every object had been chosen to make me smaller — and rented a sunlit apartment in Lincoln Park with big windows and a lease with only my name on it.

The first night I slept on an air mattress, because the furniture hadn’t come, and no one on earth knew exactly where I was, and no one was watching a blue dot cross a map, and no one called to ask why I’d taken a different way home.