But the deepest thing moving through him in those final years, the two-year agony of suspecting his own family of a monstrous crime and being unable to speak it to a soul, I had missed entirely.

It had been happening a few feet from me, in the same house, night after night, and I had not seen it, because he had not let me, because his whole upbringing had trained him that a man does not show the cracks, especially not to his wife, especially not about the family.

And I have had to sit with the humbling implication of that: that a person can share your bed and your name and your years and still carry, silently, a burden so large it is reshaping them from the inside, and you can miss it completely, not because you are unobservant but because they have decided you will not see.

It has changed how I think about everyone, since.