I was the part that held it up, and the day I decided to stop, there was nothing they could do but fall.

I looked down at the court document one last time, at the red seal that made it final.

Then I turned, and I stepped back into my bright, warm, sunlit living room — the room that was mine, in the home that was mine, in the life that was, at last, entirely and beautifully my own — and I slid the balcony door shut behind me against the coming autumn.

I did not once look back down at the street.

There was nothing down there for me anymore — only two people I had spent five years holding up, learning at last, in the rain, exactly how heavy they had always been, and exactly how little I had ever needed to carry them.