Chapter 8 — Hal, It Turns Out

I had spent those first retired weeks casting Hal, in the privacy of my own head, as the problem — the silent man, the one who’d checked out, the stranger who wouldn’t talk.

It is a great deal easier to be lonely at someone than to look at your own half of the distance.

Over that dinner, and the ones that followed, I began to learn how wrong I’d had it.

Hal, it turned out, had been just as lonely as I had, for just as long, and had a whole version of our marriage I had never once considered, because I had been too busy nursing my own.