That grammar is worth explaining, because it is the thing that keeps women in rooms they should have left years earlier, and I lived fluently inside it for seven years.

It works like this.

The cruelty always arrives dressed as a joke, or as concern, or as honesty — I’m just saying, someone has to tell you, don’t be so sensitive. If you object, you have failed to get the joke, or you are ungrateful for the honesty, or you are proving the very oversensitivity he diagnosed.

The injury and the denial of the injury come in the same sentence, welded together, so that there is no clean place to stand and say that hurt me without seeming to have caused the trouble yourself.

Mike was a master of it.

He could open a wound and hand you the blame for bleeding in the same breath, with the same fond little chuckle, and for years I had contorted myself into believing that the problem was my thin skin rather than his sharp edges.

It takes a long time to unlearn a grammar you have been made fluent in against your will.

It took me the pregnancy, and the leaving, and the years after, to finally hear that dry little chuckle by the entrance for exactly what it had always been — not banter, not affection roughened by familiarity, but contempt, wearing the one costume that made it impossible to accuse.

Chapter 2 — The Man He Used to Be

To understand why his little questions landed where they did, you would have to know the last months of our marriage, which I had spent a great deal of the intervening five years learning not to think about.

We had wanted a child.

Or I had wanted a child, and Mike had wanted the version of himself that came with one — the family in the holiday photograph, the proof of a life on schedule.

When it did not happen easily, we went to clinics, and the clinics became our whole world, a grinding cycle of appointments and injections and hope rationed out and taken away on a calendar.

It hollowed me out.