It was waking up in the morning without thinking about him.

It was a life so full and so good that he could no longer enter it, even in memory.

It was building something, a marriage, a daughter, a career, a home with fireflies in the yard, so complete and so entirely my own that his opinion of me had nowhere left to land, no purchase, no relevance, no power.

Marcus had believed, at that wedding, that his cruelest sentence would remind me he had won.

Instead, my daughter had run into my arms, and my husband had walked toward me carrying her shoes, and Marcus had finally understood what leaving me had actually accomplished.