And the four and a half hours do not become retrospectively acceptable because of what a man does at the end of them.

That is the trick my whole life had trained me to fall for — that a good ending converts the middle.

Thirteen years of smoothing things over on landings and in cars had taught me that the point of a disagreement is the moment it stops.

And lying in that bed I understood, for the first time, that the point of a disagreement is what it tells you about where you actually stand when nobody is watching.

So I did a thing I had never done in eleven years of marriage, which was to decline to accept an apology I believed.