But I was not in shock, and nothing had broken.

What had happened, in the roaring quiet after Camden left, was simpler and stranger than a breakdown.

I had stopped hoping.

For four years, without quite admitting it to myself, I had been running a low, constant, exhausting effort to believe the best of my marriage — explaining away the coldness, the absences, the growing distance, doing the daily invisible labor of a woman keeping faith with a man who was giving her less and less reason to.

That labor is what produces the tears; you weep at the collapse of a thing you were still, against the evidence, trying to hold up.