These last few sentences were said loudly and to her back as she made her way out of the Starbucks. I looked around. I was being stared at, which felt perfectly appropriate, since I just then felt lower than a carnival geek with chicken blood smeared across his teeth. That was the end of that, I figured, but of course I was wrong.

The explosion of the bitterness that had been bubbling and boiling inside me for years was a perfectly natural part of the whole sleeping-with-the-old-lover thing. Until the bitterness of the ending is drained away, the next phase of the dance can’t begin. And it wasn’t just my bitterness that had to be bled.

“You pulled away the moment you proposed,” said Julia over the phone. She had called, anger seething beneath the placid surface of her voice. Then she called again, repentant. She said she couldn’t help herself from calling. And even as I recognized her on my caller ID, I couldn’t help but answer. We were each other’s wound that we prodded and poked to know we both were still alive. I apologized for my behavior in the Starbucks. She laughed and then blamed herself and then blamed me. For my part, having released my bitterness at an overpriced coffeehouse, I was ready to accept her judgment. And wasn’t it just like Julia to nail my pathologies with deadly precision.

“I was scared,” I said.

“You could barely look at me.”

“I could always look at you.”

“It was over as soon as I agreed to marry you. It was like you never expected I would say yes.”

“I didn’t. You were too pretty, you had the body of a dancer. I expected you to burn me. Which, of course, you did. But we could have worked through it.”