Therapy might, in time, make Brandon a better man; I hoped, in some distant and disinterested way, that it would.

But a better Brandon somewhere in the future was not owed a single day of my one life, and the woman who would have handed it to him anyway — the translator, the excuse-maker, the resource — was exactly the woman I had walked out of that apartment to stop being.

I had set the bar so low for so long that I’d convinced myself a marriage in which I was merely not being hit was a marriage worth keeping.

I was not going to spend the second half of my life clearing a bar on the floor.