The structure came clear: Gregory the charming front man who got in the door, Stephanie the one who drew up the papers, Raymond the money, Renata the one who did the dangerous physical work.

Four people, one machine, and a great many women who had been made to feel they were the only fool it had ever happened to.

“He didn’t pick a foolish woman,” Nadia said to me again, when I could not stop blaming myself.

“He picked an exhausted one.

There’s a difference, and the difference is not your fault.”

There was one more thing that came out of that terrible season, and it is the thing I did not expect and would not trade.

Christopher and I found each other again — not the way you might imagine, not in some sudden rush of rekindled romance, but slowly, sidewise, in the ordinary work of standing on the same side of a shared fear.