All Chapters of THE PRICE OF LETTING GO: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

I did not sleep well.Not badly enough to call it insomnia. Just the fractured kind of sleep that comes when your brain has something in its teeth and refuses to put it down. I would go under for an hour and then surface again, ceiling, dark, the city outside doing its four in the morning thing, quiet in a way Manhattan is only ever quiet for about ninety minutes before it starts again.Is it him.I turned over.Closed my eyes.Went under again.By six I gave up.I made coffee and stood at the counter and looked at the plants and did not think about anything specific. That was the plan. Just coffee. Just the morning. Just the pale gray light coming through the window and the small terracotta plant with its new leaf that had unfurled fully overnight, open now, no longer tentative.I looked at it for a long time.Then I got dressed and went to work an hour early.The office was empty when I arrived. Just the morning light and the hum of the building and the smell of the cleaning crew’s

I woke up on Thursday and made a decision before my feet hit the floor.Not dramatic. Not announced to anyone. Just a quiet internal line drawn in the particular stillness of six in the morning when the city outside was still gray and the apartment was still mine and everything was still possible before the day started doing things to it.I was going to stop.Not stop feeling. I was not naive enough to think I had that option. But stop carrying. Stop letting fragments of Dominic Hartley’s unraveling sit in my chest like things I was responsible for. Stop reading business quarterlies in dentist waiting rooms and crying at crosswalks on Sixth Avenue like a woman who had not already done this work.I had done this work.I had earned this life.I was going to live in it.I made coffee. Drank it standing at the counter looking at the plants without attaching meaning to anything. They were plants. They needed water every four days. That was the entire relationship.I got dressed.I went to

His hand stayed open on the table.I looked at it for a second too long. Long enough that I felt the pull of it, real and warm, the simple animal gravity of a good man’s hand three inches from mine in low bar light after a night that had gone right in every way a night could go right.My fingers moved.Just slightly. Just enough that I felt the shift in my own arm before my mind caught up to what it was doing.Then I stopped.I set my hand flat on my own knee instead. Deliberate. A choice, not an accident. I wanted him to see the difference, because a man like Nicolas would know it either way, and I owed him the honest version.He saw it.Something moved through his face. Not hurt. He had already spent his hurt four days ago, cleanly, the way he did everything. This was something quieter. Understanding, maybe. Or just the particular stillness of a man confirming something he had already suspected.“Okay,” he said softly.“Nicolas—”“You don’t have to explain it.” He picked his glass b

Camille dragged me to the gallery.Not the Tribeca one. A different show, a smaller space on the same block in Chelsea, the kind of opening with warm wine in plastic cups and too many people standing too close to the art to actually see it. She had a plus-one from her firm who canceled, and rather than waste the ticket she called me at six and told me to put on something that was not sweatpants.I almost said no.I said yes instead. I had spent two weeks watching a news cycle chew on four words that did not belong to the man I used to know, and I wanted to be anywhere else.I stood in front of my closet for ten minutes before I picked anything. Pulled out the burgundy blazer, put it back. Pulled it out again. Camille texted twice asking if I was almost ready and I typed back yes both times before I actually was.The gallery was loud in the way galleries get loud. Voices bouncing off concrete floors. A string quartet nobody was listening to, fighting for space against the noise. Camill

He was waiting outside the building when I left.Not at a coffee shop. Not somewhere neutral with no history. He was standing on the sidewalk across from Crane and Aldous, hands in his coat pockets, no car at the curb, no Priya a step behind him with a folder.Just him.I stopped on the top step. Behind me Petra said goodnight to Ro, and her voice trailed off when she saw where I was looking. Someone’s chair scraped against the floor inside. The door swung shut behind me with its usual soft click.I stood there a moment before I crossed. Long enough that he noticed me noticing him and did not move, did not wave, just stood with his hands in his pockets and let me take whatever time I needed to decide whether to close the distance myself.I crossed the street.“You said today,” I said. “You didn’t say where.”“I didn’t know where until I got here.” He looked past me at the building, at the fourth floor windows still lit. “I’ve been standing here forty minutes trying to figure out what