My husband of fifteen years.

The man who carried the elderly neighbors’ groceries up their steps, who charmed every room he entered, who had not once in a decade and a half so much as shouted at me.

The man everyone called lucky Valerie’s husband, as if I were the one who’d landed above my station.

These were the two people my mother’s broken voice was telling me had been in a room together, and that one of them had left the other bruised.

I have thought a great deal since about how completely I believed in Ronan, because it embarrasses me, and because I think the embarrassment is worth sitting with rather than hiding.

I am not a naive woman.