There is a particular freedom in the aftermath of an ending, and it does not feel the way you expect it to feel.

I had expected, for months, that when Piyush finally went — when the visits stopped being a thing we organised our lives around and became instead a thing that happened occasionally, at a distance, with notice — I would feel something clean. Relief, I had thought. The simple subtraction of a weight. I had imagined the flat returning to its proper proportions the way a room returns to itself when you take down the scaffolding, and I had imagined standing in the middle of that restored room and breathing out.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.