Here is the part I have never been able to make anybody understand, including a therapist, for about a year.

Everyone wants to know why I believed a photograph over a woman I had been married to for six years.

And the answer is not that I was stupid, and it is not that I was jealous, although I was both.

The answer is that I was in a place where I was awake for nineteen hours a day and where nothing I could do about anything at home was worth anything, and where the only person I spoke to about my own life was my mother.

I called her every Sunday.