I Came Home Unannounced After Four Years Abroad and Found My Wife Starved and Shaved in the Backyard. My Mother Said She’d Brought It on Herself. I Didn’t Yell

It was Phedra, of course, who took that away from me, the way she has taken every heavy thing off my shoulders since the day I met her.

She told me, on this same terrace, one evening early in her recovery, that I had to stop.

That I had gone to Canada because we had dreamed a future together and someone had to go build it, and that I had gone out of love, and worked out of love, and sent every dollar home out of love — and that the fact that my love had been fed into a machine that betrayed it was not my crime but theirs.

“You didn’t do this to me, Damian,” she said.