I need to sit with that phrase, because it is the hinge of the whole catastrophe: my mother answered before Aurora could open her mouth. How many times did that happen, over the year?

Dozens.

I would ask my own wife a direct question in my own home, and my mother would step into the pause and answer it for her, and I let her — let a third person speak for my wife, again and again, and never once wondered why Aurora had gone so quiet that someone else always filled her silence.

A man paying attention would have noticed that his wife had stopped answering for herself.

A man paying attention would have noticed that the answers came pre-packaged, always flattering to my mother and always faintly diminishing to Aurora, always designed to close the subject before it could open.

But I was not paying attention, because paying attention was expensive, and my mother’s answers were free and convenient and let me get on with my evening. She’s just fragile. I accepted that my wife had become fragile without once asking what had made a healthy woman fragile in the space of a year.