She was, as I'd always known her to be when she wasn't on the defensive, fundamentally a decent person. We divided what needed to be divided.
The townhouse sold in 3 weeks at a price that was good for both of us. Seattle real estate moves fast when the house is right.
She sent me one email, formal and short, in the middle of the process. It said, "I understand now what I did and didn't do. I'm sorry. I hope Singapore is everything you needed it to be."
I read it a few times, then I wrote back: "Take care of yourself, Petra. I hope things go well for you."
And I meant it. That's the part people sometimes don't believe, that you can genuinely hope things go well for someone who hurt you when you're far enough removed from the hurt to see the whole picture clearly.
She wasn't a villain. She was a person who got something wrong and couldn't see it from inside it. That's a human failure, not a monstrous one.
Damon Reyes, for what it's worth, was apparently not the great friend she'd sacrificed her marriage for.
Todd told me through the grapevine that connects all cities that Damon had started dating someone new within weeks of Petra ending things.
Whether that means anything or nothing, I don't know. It's not information I need.
I've been in Singapore 14 months now. The Asia-Pacific team has grown.
We have seven analysts under my direction and we're managing a portfolio that would have seemed abstract to me when I was sitting in the Meridian Seattle office turning this job down.
I know the neighborhoods of this city the way I know Seattle. Not perfectly, but personally.
I know where to eat on a Tuesday night and where to run on a Saturday morning and which hawker stalls are worth the line.
I've made friends. Suki, who turned out to be one of the sharpest people I've ever worked alongside; a British expat named Gareth, who works in shipping and has opinions about everything; a few other relocated professionals who understood the specific experience of building a life somewhere unfamiliar on purpose.
Todd came to visit in month four. We spent a weekend eating our way through the hawker centers and arguing about whether Singapore was a city-state that had figured something out or an authoritarian experiment that happened to have great infrastructure. Both things are probably true.
My father called every week for the first few months, worried in the way fathers worry about decisions they don't fully understand.
By month five, he'd stopped worrying and started asking questions about the work, which was how I knew he'd accepted it.
Theo visited in month 8. He stood in my apartment in Tanjong Pagar looking out the window at the skyline and said, "You seem like yourself."
What did I seem like before? I asked, like someone explaining to himself why something was fine.
I didn't have a response to that. He was right.
There's a version of this story where I'm the hero and Petra is the villain. That version would be simpler and more satisfying, probably, if that's what you came here for.
But that's not what this story is. The truth is closer to this: I stayed quiet too long about things that mattered.
I turned down Singapore the first time because I thought self-sacrifice was the same as love, and it isn't. It's a debt that breeds resentment.
I waited for Petra to see what I needed instead of being direct about the fact that I needed it.