Everybody needed you and you needed the kids and I couldn’t figure out where I fit, so I stopped trying to fit and just worked.” I sat with that, stunned, because for twenty-five years I had been telling myself the story of a wife abandoned by a husband who cared more about his job, and here, across a restaurant table, was the same quarter-century told from the other side: a husband who’d felt crowded out of his own family and had retreated to the one place he still felt useful.

We had both been lonely.

We had both felt abandoned.

We had each been so certain we were the one left behind that it never occurred to either of us that we were both standing in the same cold house, back to back, each sure the other had walked away.

That is the thing about a drift, I have come to understand: it has no author, and so both people get to be the victim of it, and both people are wrong.

For twenty-five years I had held a grievance against Hal — polished it, really, taken it out on the bad nights and turned it over: the husband who chose his work, who wasn’t there, who let me carry everything and disappeared into the plant.