It's fine. It's actually fine. Some nights I'd sit in the office with something on the monitor and think about the 12 years and try to locate the exact point where it had stopped being real. Whether there was a moment, a specific one, where something shifted and she'd started looking elsewhere. I'd go looking for it and I'd never find it, not exactly, which I eventually decided was information in itself.
Maybe there wasn't a moment. Maybe it was just incremental. Just a slow drift that neither of us named until she drifted all the way to someone else. Maybe the marriage had been over for a while before the spa weekend started. I don't know.
I'm not sure it matters for practical purposes. What I know is this, she handed me a broken iPad and asked me to wipe it, and it wasn't broken, and I didn't wipe it. That's the whole thing when you strip it down. I stopped tracking any of them. I mean that literally.
I deleted the family locator app, removed myself from every shared account, unfollowed every mutual contact who was going to keep me adjacent to Holly's life or Amber's. Not dramatically, I just stopped. No group texts, no courtesy check-ins, no I heard you're doing well messages. If something was happening in their lives, I was no longer the audience for it. That's not a policy I had to work to maintain.
It just became true. I don't know what Brent's doing now. I know what he was doing last fall, and I have excellent documentation of it, and that's sufficient. A few months out, I was eating dinner at the kitchen counter. Actual dinner, not cereal, I'd made a point of that, and I noticed that the apartment was quiet in a way that used to feel like something was missing, and now just felt like quiet.
That's not a dramatic shift. It doesn't come with a revelation or a moral. It's more like one day you notice the adjustment has already happened without you scheduling it. The camera's in the closet. I haven't needed it since.
The photos and video are on a drive in the office, backed up in two places. Same as I told Holly that night in the cabin. I don't look at them. I don't need to look at them. They did their job, and now they just sit there on a drive in a labeled folder, and occasionally I'm aware they exist, and then I go back to whatever I was doing.
I think about that night sometimes. The window, the curtain, the light, the sound of the door going in, Brent hitting the wall and looking up at me from the floor, his eye already closing, not saying a word. I made the right calls.
Start to finish, I made the right calls. That doesn't fix anything, but it's not nothing either. It's the thing I got to keep.