But I understood, at last, that I had been divorcing a stranger — that spending eight years beside a person is not remotely the same as knowing what they carry in the dark.

This was, of everything the ordeal revealed, the discovery that unsettled me most, because it forced me to reckon not only with who Kieran was but with the limits of intimacy itself, with how little we can ever truly know of even the people we sleep beside.

I had thought, as most married people think, that eight years of shared life had made me an expert on my husband — that I knew his moods, his tells, his fears, the whole interior country of him.

And I had known some of it, the surface of it, the version he presented across a breakfast table.