“I don’t think I’ll be signing that tonight, Dulce,” I said, and my voice was clear, and level, and carried the whole authority of the man I had been before I let a lonely widower take his place.

I have been asked, since, what that moment felt like, and the honest answer is that it felt like coming back to life.

For a year I had made myself smaller and smaller — had let Dulce speak over me, had performed the confusion she needed me to have, had watched myself shrink in the eyes of my own guests until I nearly believed the shrinking was real.

And for the three days of the counter-plan I had gone smaller still, playing the failing old man with such commitment that a part of me had begun to grieve him as though he were true.

So to set that pen down, to sit up to my full height, to feel my own voice come out of me with the old force I thought I had buried with Bess — it was not triumph, exactly, though there was triumph in it.

It was resurrection.