A month on, Tiffany’s second payment reached my account with a note — I’m sorry for all of it.
I see it now. I accepted it and answered in four words: Account closed.
Moving on. Shane found me one last time, waiting by my car outside Tamsin’s place in a wrinkled shirt I would once have reached out to smooth.
I didn’t slow down.
He offered a rehearsed little list of his sins — the hospital, the texts, letting his mother do what she did.
“Shane,” I said, closing the trunk, “you only ever admit guilt when you’re the one in pain.
As long as I was the one bleeding, you were fine.
I was just the shield between you and your mother.” He had no answer to that.
A week later he signed the divorce papers without contesting a single line, and the door to that chapter shut for good.
People kept expecting me to want more than that — a bigger vengeance, a public ruin, something dramatic enough to match what had been done to me.