I want to be honest about what I felt, sitting there, because it was not the clean happy ending people imagine.

There was grief in it.

I had loved Nicolas, or loved who I’d believed he was, for eight years, and you do not set that down without mourning it, even when setting it down is the only sane thing left to do.

But the grief sat alongside something I had not felt in longer than I could remember, which was room to breathe.

For years our whole house had been organized, silently, around one man’s wanting — around the trying, the hoping, the bracing for his disappointment, the exhausting management of a mood that could sour a birthday or dim a Christmas.

I had not noticed the weight of it because I had never once, in eight years, been without it.