I would have gone on doing that, I think, for decades, out of love, or the habit of love, or the fear of being the divorced woman he warned me no one would want.

His leaving broke the spell.

It threw me, terrified, into a life of my own, and the terror lasted about a year, and then, slowly, I discovered that the woman he had spent our marriage telling me I was, small and dependent and unremarkable, had never existed at all.

She had been a story he told to keep me manageable, and the moment he left, the story lost its author, and I was free to find out who I actually was.

And who I actually was turned out to be a partner, and a wife, and a mother, and a person who could dismantle a fraud and save eighty jobs and build a life with fireflies in the yard.