I think often now about the word my husband used that last night, standing on the porch: alone.

He’d meant it as a curse, the worst thing he could think to leave me with. You’re good at being alone. And in a way he was right, and in a way he had the whole thing exactly backward, which was fitting, because he’d had everything exactly backward for six years.

I was good at being alone, because he had made me practice it inside a marriage.

But the thing I’d been missing was never company.

Cassian had surrounded me — with his mother, his opinions, his verdicts, his hand always over mine — and I had never been more alone in my life.

Being surrounded and being trapped had become, for six years, the same sensation, so completely that I’d forgotten they were ever supposed to be different.

It took a quiet man across a road, and a wild orchard, and two heartbeats on a screen, to teach me the difference.

You are trapped when the people around you need you smaller than you are.

You are home when they don’t.

It felt like home.

THE END.