What I had, it turned out, was both more and less than I’d believed: equity in a house I no longer lived in, retirement accounts whose projections had been built on a marriage already ending, credit balances I’d signed without really seeing. Catherine’s spreadsheet became an emotional X-ray; every line item revealed the places I’d stepped aside and let Marcus stand in front of my own life. While lawyers and mediators translated our history into percentages and payouts, I stood in the hollowed-out center of a future I hadn’t chosen, rehearsing how not to touch the savings I’d promised myself I wouldn’t touch. That first unscheduled summer, without his family’s beach house or our shared itineraries, I picked up a paintbrush the way some people pick up a lifeline. Color spread across canvas in shapes that refused to be polite, loud where I’d been quiet, wild where I’d been careful. As the small rooms of my rented apartment filled with work no one had asked for, I began to suspect that what I’d lost might not be the same as what I’d bee… Continues…