But we began, in those days, to do the one thing we had entirely stopped doing in the last years of our marriage: we talked to each other.

Directly.

Honestly.

Not through high-priced attorneys, not through executive assistants, not around the edges of a work schedule that always came first, but plainly, two people in a quiet hospital room, saying true things.

And I came to understand that this, more than any grand romantic gesture, was the true substance of what we were rebuilding — not a fairytale reunion, but a slow return to honest speech between two people who had forgotten how, and who were learning it again, a true sentence at a time, for the sake of the small person sleeping between them.

I want to say something about that, about the honest speech, because it is where the real work turned out to be, and it was nothing like what I had expected.