I want to be honest about how it felt, because I do not want anyone to think it came easily, or that I am some cold man who can watch his wife suffer without moving.

It was agony.

Every second I stood there was a second she was still on her knees on that concrete, still hungry, still humiliated, and every second I did not go to her was a small betrayal of my own — I felt that, sharply, the whole time.

There is a voice in a man at a moment like that, a hot loud voice, and it was screaming at me that a real husband would already be through the door, that listening was cowardice dressed up as strategy, that I was standing safe behind a fence weighing tactics while the person I loved paid for my patience in real time.

I have never hated a voice more, or fought harder to keep from obeying it.