I knew Shane would be at work and would answer no unknown numbers before lunch.
I knew Tiffany would follow whoever seemed strongest in the room.
I knew every reflex, every script, every predictable cruelty — because for five years I had organized my entire life around anticipating them, defusing them, cleaning up after them before they detonated.
All that painful, exhausting fluency, which had kept me trapped for so long, turned in a single night into the thing that set me free.
I had learned them in order to serve them.
Now I used what I’d learned to leave them, and there was a justice in that so quiet and so complete that I nearly laughed in the back of that copy shop.
I rented a climate-controlled storage unit and locked my physical life inside it.
Then I called Tamsin, a friend from college who ran a rambling guest house out in Dublin, past the edge of the city.
“Don’t explain,” Tamsin said, the instant she heard how tired I was.
“The back cottage is aired out.