I’ve got a meeting first thing tomorrow.”

Something in me that had been holding for six years quietly let go.

Not with a bang — it was almost the opposite, a kind of silence, the sensation of a rope you didn’t know was under tension finally parting.

For six years I had absorbed their little contempts about where I came from, and I had paid for all of it while I absorbed them — the mortgage, the cars, the vacations, Corinna’s handbags, all of it on my income — and I had told myself that swallowing it was the price of keeping a family together.

I looked at my mother, who had once sold the last of her family’s land to put me through school, standing there sweating and apologizing for existing, and every ounce of that swallowing came back up at once.

I want to describe the swallowing, because it is the part of a marriage like mine that people who’ve never lived one don’t understand.