But there is a limit, even to that.

There is a floor beneath which absorption becomes complicity in your own erasure, and Blair’s shears had dropped me straight through it.

When I came up on the other side, the hesitating woman was gone, and I did not miss her, because I finally saw what her hesitation had actually been: not virtue, but fear wearing virtue’s clothes.

The pen moved across the paper in a clean, unhurried line.

Fifteen years of a marriage ended in the time it takes to write eight letters, and I felt, signing it, the specific lightness of setting down a weight you have carried so long you stopped noticing it was there.

Chapter 13 — The Forty-Second Floor