She spelled four letters on a bedsheet with a trembling finger, and it was one of the bravest things I have ever seen a human being do, and it made no sound at all.

She was, I realized, exactly as tough as she had always been, and I had simply never had occasion to see it before.

That realization reorganized how I understood Jessi, and I have thought about it often since, because it corrected a quiet condescension I had not known I carried.

For decades I had thought of Jessi Vance, if I am honest, as the softer point of the triangle — the wife, the homemaker, the one who ran the small family business while Luca and I built our more visible careers.

I had been fond of her, protective of her even, in the mild way one is protective of a friend’s gentle wife.