The note was short, because everything I needed to say had already been said by the boxes he carried into the spare room without once asking me. It read: I can’t marry a man who moves me out of my own life to make room for someone else. The apartment is mine. It always was. Please take your mother and her twelve boxes and go. I had thought about it all night, sitting in the dark kitchen while the two of them slept, and by the time the sun came up I had already packed a single bag and driven to my sister’s across town. What he did not know yet, what he would only discover when he reached for the lease to argue, was that his name had never been on it.

The apartment in Evanston was mine. My name on the lease, my deposit, my rent paid from my own salary for three years before he ever proposed. He had moved in eight months earlier, and somewhere in that time he and his mother had quietly begun treating my home as their inheritance. My phone started ringing at 7:40 that morning, his name lighting up the screen again and again while a reception hall sat booked and a hundred guests began pinning on their good clothes. I let it ring twice. Then I answered, because some things you say directly, and I wanted him to hear my voice when I said them.