I was wrong.
I got the house. I got the number. The judge saw exactly who Brian was.
And none of that was the part that mattered.
Brian had broken something I loved because he wanted to hurt me one last time. He’d thought about it. He’d planned it. He’d tried to use my own father to do it, and when that didn’t work, he’d done it with his own hands.
Ezoic
He wanted me to walk into that house and fall apart. He wanted me to kneel on that floor and feel like everything I loved could be taken away by him whenever he decided.
Ezoic
And for one afternoon, it worked.
But only for one afternoon.
Because he hadn’t broken my ability to move forward. He couldn’t. That wasn’t his to break. It never had been.
I keep the piece of old glass in my jewelry box now, next to Grandma Lena’s reading glasses and my mother’s wedding ring. Some mornings I take it out and hold it up to the light and look at my wavy, underwater eye in it. And then I put it back, and I go stand in front of the clear glass on the living room wall, and I brush my hair.
