The difference between us, Camilla, is that I stopped believing him.” I looked at her for a moment, this clever young woman who had traded her own career for a seat beside a man who had described, to each of us separately, the other’s irrelevance.

“That was the story you preferred,” I said, not unkindly.

“It was easier than the truth.

It usually is.

I did not say it to wound her, though I imagine it did.

I said it because it was the truest thing I knew about the whole arrangement, and because she was young enough that it might, someday, be worth something to her to have heard it.

We would both of us have preferred the easy story — she that I was nobody, I that my marriage was fine — and we had both of us chosen it, for a while, over the harder and more accurate one, and the difference between us in the end was only which of us stopped choosing it first.”