It came from somewhere older than my marriage.

I had grown up in a house where the women were watched — where my father kept a quiet, constant, proprietary eye on my mother’s comings and goings, where a woman’s loyalty was treated as a thing perpetually in question, to be monitored and secured, while a man’s was simply assumed.

I had absorbed that too, along with everything else, without ever choosing it: the reflex that, handed a shape in a dark hallway, reaches first for the suspicion that the woman closest to you has betrayed you.

It is a poisonous inheritance, and it is a common one, and its cruelest trick is that it points you in exactly the wrong direction.

While I lay there in the dark suspecting my innocent wife of a betrayal she would never have dreamed of, the actual betrayal — my father’s, running for months right down the hall — went on undisturbed, protected in part by the very reflex that had me watching the wrong person.

The men of my family had trained me to guard against unfaithful women, and while I stood guard, a faithless man walked past me every night.