“On the third day, sitting on that floor, I stopped thinking about how much I wanted you back, and I made myself remember, instead, the way you had looked at me during our last argument.

I remembered how little it had cost you to throw away seven years of marriage the moment things got genuinely hard.

And I understood something that saved both of our lives — mine and hers.

I understood that if I called you, and you came back, you would not be coming back out of love.

You would be coming back out of obligation, because there was a baby, because it was the correct thing to be seen doing.

And my child would grow up in a house with a father who resented her mother, who had been trapped into staying, who valued how things looked over how the people in his own home actually felt.