Because to believe my wife would have required something of me.

It would have required a confrontation with my own mother, the disruption of my comfortable house, the admission that the woman who raised me had become someone capable of cruelty.

And I did not want to pay any of that, so I chose, again and again, in a hundred small acts of willed blindness, to believe the version of events that let me keep my evening calm.

My mother was the one who did it.

I want to be clear about that; the cruelty was hers.

But cruelty like hers cannot run for a year in a household without a second person agreeing not to see it, and I was that second person.