That was the thing that counted.

He did not leave.

I have turned that sentence over more than any other sentence in my life, because for ten years it was the foundation of everything I believed about my marriage, and because at half past nine on a Thursday morning in a recovery room it stopped being true in the only way that matters.

And I have had to work out what it means that both things are facts.

He stayed for an hour on a bathroom floor in the fifth year.