The Cleveland sky was the color of a bruised plum the morning my life, as I understood it, quietly dismantled itself.

I am sixty-five years old now. When you reach this vantage point, looking back at the timeline of your existence, you realize that history isn’t written in years or decades. It’s written in moments. The moment you said “I do.” The moment you bought the house with the leaky gutter on Elm Street. The moment you realized the person sleeping next to you was no longer a lover, but a habit.For thirty-seven years, my history was inseparable from Patrick Miller.

We were not a fairytale. We were a mortgage, two cars that needed oil changes, and arguments about the thermostat. We were Sunday pot roasts and silent compromises. But I believed, with the stubborn, concrete certainty of a woman who had built a foundation brick by brick, that we were permanent. I believed that when the end of the world came, we would be standing in our kitchen, probably bickering about who forgot to buy milk, but we would be standing there together.That belief ended on a Tuesday in a domestic relations courtroom that smelled of floor wax and stale anxiety.

The proceedings were clinical. The judge, a man who looked like he hadn’t slept well since the Reagan administration, shuffled papers with the indifference of a butcher wrapping meat. There were no dramatic outbursts. No throwing of vases. Just the quiet scratching of pens.