The answer, when I let myself see it, was not flattering, and it is the reason I built the clinic.

I did it because I had been taught, the way so many women are taught, that love is proven by sacrifice, and that the greater the sacrifice, the truer the love.

I did it because being needed felt like being valued, and carrying his secret made me indispensable to him, and I mistook that indispensability for intimacy.

And I did it, most of all, because somewhere I believed that my suffering was a kind of currency I was spending to buy his happiness, and that this was what a good wife did — that a marriage was a place where the woman quietly bled so the man could stand up straight.

No one held a gun to me.

That is the hard truth.