I want to say a word about that email, and about why I did not answer it, because I know some people hearing this story will think me cold for it — that a genuinely good woman would have granted a repentant man his coffee, his closure, his chance to say he was sorry to my face.

I have examined that objection honestly, and I have rejected it, and here is why.

Julian’s apology, however sincerely he may have felt it in the moment of writing, was not actually about me.

Read closely, it was about him.

He was under pressure from his mother; he had lost himself; he regretted; he needed closure.

Every clause of it circled back to his own feelings, his own suffering, his own need to be relieved of the discomfort of having been the villain.