There are men who love you loudly, in gestures and declarations, and men who love you like weather, steady and unremarked and simply always there.

I had married the first kind and been nearly ruined by him.

I had been raised by the second, and had spent a foolish handful of years failing to know the difference.

Standing on that staircase looking at my father’s face, I knew it for good.

I came down the grand staircase in a silk robe with my sleeping daughter held against my chest, and I stopped on the bottom step, and I looked down at the wreck of the man I had married.

Chapter 11 — Noelle Meant Nothing