The strange, persistent, patient interest in exactly what would happen, financially, to everything I owned, if something ever happened to me.

I had explained every one of those things away, one at a time, because seeing them clearly would have meant seeing my marriage clearly, and I was not ready.

Lying in that hospital bed, I finally let myself see all of it at once, and the betrayal was, in its way, a second fall — longer, and in some respects harder to survive than the first.

The cliff had only tried to take my life.

The truth took nine years of it, retroactively, and revealed them to have been a lie.

Chapter 7 — The Hospital