Claudia means nothing to me, you heard her, the baby isn’t even mine — it was always you, it was always supposed to be you and me, fifteen years, Camila, please—”

I looked down at him from the wheelchair they had insisted I use, and I felt the cold clear thing in my chest that had carried me through the whole of it, and I did not feel cruelty in it, and I did not feel triumph.

I felt only certainty.

“Three days ago,” I said, “you stood over my hospital bed and told me to sign divorce papers before they opened my skull, so that my death wouldn’t inconvenience your paperwork.

You called me defective.

You told a lobby full of people I was a parasite.