I blocked it because I had, at last, nothing further to say to a closed chapter, and no reason to reopen a door I had spent so much to walk out of.

Darcy lifted her iced coffee in a small, proud toast.

“That’s my girl,” she said.

And for the first time, hearing it, I believed her.

We spent the rest of the afternoon on my company’s third-quarter numbers.

It turned out that a business freed of the enormous, invisible cost of funding a parasitic husband and his mother is a very different business.