I thought about that question for a long time after — why were you so calm. It was, I realized, the only genuinely curious thing Bryce asked me in the whole ordeal, the one moment he tried to understand something about me rather than about what I’d cost him.

And the true answer was too large for a phone call.

I was calm because calm is what’s left when hope finally burns off.

For years I had not been calm at all; I had been in a low, constant churn of hoping — hoping he’d notice the girls, hoping he’d become the man I married, hoping the next birthday or the next holiday or the next hard conversation would be the one that turned him back into someone I could build a life beside.

Hope like that is exhausting; it is a full-time job with no wages.