She did not go to Dane’s counseling sessions.

But the counselor, with Dane’s consent, shared with her one thing he said in them, because it bore on Alma’s future and she had a right to it.

Dane admitted, in that room, what he had never once managed to admit in two years of marriage: that he had spent the whole of it feeling small beside her.

That instead of letting her strength be a thing he was proud of, a thing that lifted them both, he had experienced it as a standing accusation, a daily measurement he kept failing.

And that when his mother offered him a way to make his wife smaller — to clip her, to ground her, to bring her down to a size he could stand beside without feeling diminished — he had not fought it the way a husband should.

He had let it happen, and told himself he was protecting his family, because that was more bearable than admitting he was protecting his ego.