‘I was here. This happened. It mattered. And now, I am ready to carry on.’

This is not a book about breakups. It’s about erasure. About the quiet harm that can live inside love, the kind that doesn’t leave bruises on the skin but rewrites the architecture of your mind. It’s for anyone who’s wondered whether they were overreacting, too sensitive, too much, too little. Anyone who has asked, ‘Am I the problem?’

Joy Watson’s exquisite excavation of the female psyche traces the inner lives of three women: Zara, Mira and Thuli. Their stories unfold in fragments, with beginnings, middles and endings that are not always clean, and are interwoven with reflections from the author’s own experience. These are real stories, lightly fictionalised to protect those who lived them.

If you have ever felt lonelier in a relationship than you were on your own, this book is for you. And as you begin again, you are not alone.