I will only say that a grown woman held another woman down and took a pair of shears to her, in an office tower, over a man, and that I have never in my life felt anything like the cold that came over me when I saw what was left.

People assume, when they hear this story, that I must have wept in front of that mirror.

I did not.

Something stranger happened.

I looked at the ruined stranger staring back at me, and instead of grief I felt a kind of terrible clarity descend, the way the air goes still and sharp right before a storm.

For years I had been slowly disappearing inside my own marriage — apologizing for taking up space, making excuses for the late nights, shrinking myself smaller and smaller so that Conrad would have room to be the great man everyone told me he was.