I thought of the swim class Toby had wanted, and had not gotten, the autumn Brandon spent thousands on weekends I had believed were work.

I thought of how carefully I had economized on our child’s shoes while a woman named Valerie received forty-five hundred dollars marked personal business expenses. The betrayal that undid me was not the affair itself.

It was the arithmetic underneath it — the proof, in cold bank ink, that when it came time to choose between his comfort and our son’s small joys, he had chosen his comfort every single time, and had looked me in the eye and blamed the shortfall on money that did not exist.

You can grieve a man who loved you badly.