I didn’t think about Derek anymore. Or rather, I had trained myself to treat thoughts of him like inadmissible evidence—irrelevant, prejudicial, and stricken from the record.

The running helped. Three miles through Laurelhurst Park, past the duck pond and the community garden, looping back along the tree-lined streets where Victorian houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder like disapproving judges. By the time I finished, my mind would be blessedly quiet, my body too exhausted for the circular arguments that otherwise plagued me. The mediation sessions that had grown hostile. The division of assets that felt like dividing up a corpse.