I set my phone down after the call and stayed where I was for a while.
The hotel suite was quiet. The city outside the window was doing its evening thing, all light
and movement and complete indifference to the fact that something had just ended. Not
everything. Not the paperwork, not the legal proceedings, not the long slow work of what
came after. But the center of it. The thing that had been pressing against all of us for months
had finally, in the space of one afternoon and one evening phone call, gone still.
It was over. Not entirely. But enough.
I sat with that until the city outside went darker and the suite got quieter and then I got up,
made tea I didn’t quite finish, and went to bed earlier than I had in weeks. I didn’t lie awake.
I didn’t run through timelines or review
