Relief, yes, enormous relief, a physical loosening in my chest as though a hand that had been closed around my heart for two years had finally opened.
But underneath the relief was a strange, cold sadness — not for him, exactly, but for the whole waste of it.
This man had once stood across an altar from me.
He had held our son on the day he was born.
He had possessed, at the start, every advantage a person could want — money, intelligence, freedom, a family.
And he had spent all of it, every gift, building an elaborate machine to grind down the mother of his own child.
What a staggering waste of a life.
I did not forgive him, standing there.
I am not sure I ever will, and I have stopped believing I am required to.
But I did feel, for one clear moment, the plain sad enormity of what he had chosen, and what it had cost, and how little he had gotten for it in the end.