Mostly, though, I didn’t feel what I expected to feel. I had imagined, in the abstract, that leaving would come with some rush of vindication, some clean sense of triumph, the satisfying music of a woman who had finally seen the truth and walked out with her head high and her dog at her side. It wasn’t like that. Mostly I just felt tired. Bone tired, the specific exhaustion of realizing how much energy I had been spending, for years, without knowing it, on believing a version of a man that had never been real. There was no music. There was just the quiet, and my sister making me tea I didn’t drink, and Baxter following me from room to room as if he understood.
My sister was careful with me in those days, in the way that only someone who has known you your whole life knows how to be. She didn’t lecture me. She didn’t say the things I could see her wanting to say, the I never trusted him and the I always thought something was off, which she saved, mercifully, for much later, when I could laugh about them. Instead she simply made space. She left me alone when I needed to be alone and appeared with food when I hadn’t eaten, and one evening she sat down next to me on the guest bed without a word and put her head on my shoulder and stayed there while I stared at the wall, and that was the closest I came, in those six days, to feeling held together. I kept thinking about the years. That was the thing that circled and circled. Not the cruelty at the restaurant, which had at least been honest, but the years of the other thing, the smiling and the deflecting and the forehead kisses, all of it a performance staged for an audience of one, and I the only person in the world who hadn’t been let in on the plot.
David called every day. I didn’t answer any of them. I watched his name appear on the screen and I let it ring out, and each time, the not answering got a little easier. On the sixth night, he left a voicemail. I listened to it once. In it, his voice was different, softer, unsteady, and he said that he finally understood, that he saw what he had done, that he was sorry. I didn’t call back.
