Camille Winters.
Sometimes, late, I think about that night. The suitcase zipper in the dark. His voice above me, so sure. Poor Camille. You never even saw it coming.
He was wrong about almost everything, in the end, but he was never more wrong than that.
I saw all of it coming. I saw it coming the way a woman sees a storm she’s been tracking for months, calm at the window while a foolish man runs out into it certain the sky is clear.
He called me useless and a photo of his smug face at an airport, sure he’d stripped me of everything.
He stripped me of nothing.
He only, finally, forced me to pick back up the one thing I should never have put down — and to remember, at forty-three, standing at a window watching the first snow fall over a life that was about to become entirely my own, exactly who I have always been.
