“You’ll survive,” he said from the porch, before he left.

He looked almost fond.

“You’re good at being alone.”

He meant it as the last cut, and it landed as one.

But he was also, without knowing it, telling me the truth.

I had spent six years being made alone inside a marriage — alone with the injections, alone in the recovery rooms, alone with a verdict about my own body that I’d never been allowed to question.