A name is not a small thing.

When I married Luca, I had taken his, the way I had been raised to expect I would, and at the time it had felt like a natural and even a romantic act, a joining, a becoming-part-of.

And I did not notice, for eleven years, the quiet symbolism of it, the way that in taking his name I had begun the long process of subsuming myself into his story, of becoming Mrs.

Vance, wife of, supporter of, the woman standing slightly behind the man whose name we now shared.