Not as a partner, not even really as a person, but as a tired man with a pen, a set of assets attached to a signature that could be caught at a weak moment.

It is a strange and cold thing, to read the exact inventory another person made of your weaknesses while they were pretending to love you.

I do not think I will ever fully forget the particular chill of it.

There is a specific kind of loneliness in discovering that someone who shared your bed and your table had, the whole time, been keeping a private ledger of your vulnerabilities.

Every tired evening when I had signed papers without reading them closely, trusting the people around me, she had noted.