I thought about how he could recite every line of her favorite Disney movies, not because he had studied them but because he had watched them beside her a hundred times and loved watching her mouth the words.

I thought about five years of a marriage I had privately, shamefully, half-suspected of being some kind of arrangement, and I understood now that it had been the opposite of an arrangement.

It had begun as a rescue, yes.

But it had become, somewhere in that yellow house, entirely real.

“I hated you for two whole minutes,” I said quietly, leaning my head back against the cold wall beside him.

“Back there, when I read it.