I have thought a great deal about why the heartbreak never came, because it seems, on its face, like it should have — I had, after all, just lost the man I believed I was going to spend my life with, two days before my wedding, in the most public way imaginable.

By any ordinary accounting, I should have been devastated.

But you cannot grieve a person who was never there.

That is the thing I understood, slowly, over the weeks that followed.

The Nathan I loved — the warm, devoted man who helped with homework and hoped to be called Dad — had never existed.

He was a role, played by a stranger, for a purpose.

And you cannot break your heart over the ending of a fiction; the man I would have mourned had been imaginary all along, and the man who was real, the one on that recording, I had never loved for a second, because I had never once met him until the line stayed open.