What was harder to survive was learning you had been, all that time, a problem someone was solving.

Ruth listened without touching her own cup, which had gone cold. She was thinking, Claire could see, about the phone calls.

Jason called his parents every Sunday. He talked to them about the home repairs, about a family trip he was thinking of planning, about what everyone should do for Christmas.

In all those months of Sundays he had never once said the word divorce.

He had never told them he was paying the lowest child support the law would let him get away with.

He had never told them that he had promised to come to Owen’s birthday and then, an hour before, had not.