Dane had married her strength and then spent two years being diminished by it, and instead of doing the hard interior work of growing to meet her, he had gone looking, without ever admitting it to himself, for someone who would help him cut her down to a height he could stand beside comfortably.

And his mother had been standing right there the whole time, holding the shears, delighted to be asked.

Marisela had watched the change happen by degrees, so slowly she had kept explaining it away — the stress of the baby, the pressure of the family, a hard season that would pass.

It was not a hard season.

It was who he had turned out to be when being married to her got difficult, and the collar, and the shoes he studied while his mother held it out, had simply made it impossible to keep pretending otherwise.

“Your wife,” Sabetha said lightly to the room, recovering, “always does find a way to make a scene.”