I took a sip of wine, and leaned back into the warmth of my husband’s arm, and listened to the waves come in against the shore, knowing, with total certainty, that my story had not ended on that marble floor five years ago.

It had only just begun.

I have thought, often, about the strange journey of that sentence, leaving you was the smartest thing I ever did, the sentence Marcus brought to that wedding like a weapon, and what it means that I have come to agree with it completely.

Because he meant it as a wound, a final twist of the knife, a way of telling me that I had been the error in his life and he was the wise man who had corrected it.

And every word of it has turned out to be true, only inverted, only pointed in the exact opposite direction from the one he intended.