I had let the call connect, and I asked myself, even as I did it, why.

I owed him nothing.

I could have let it ring into the void, could have blocked the number an hour earlier and never heard his voice again.

But I think I needed to hear it — needed the last data point, the final confirmation.

Because if there had been one word in it that was not about himself, one syllable of I’m sorry for what I did rather than please help me now that it’s done to me, I might have felt that my two years had been an injustice rather than a diagnosis.

There wasn’t.