And it was true.

But it was exactly one half of a true thing, and the other half, which I had never once made myself look at, was a wife so poured into her children that her husband became a kind of appliance in his own home, useful and unregarded, and who felt his loneliness as sulking rather than grief because seeing it as grief would have obligated her to do something about it.

We had each built a complete and satisfying story in which we were the wronged party, and we had each been living inside our own story for a quarter of a century, never comparing notes, because comparing notes would have required the very conversation we had both given up on.

The cruelty of it, sitting across that restaurant table finally trading the two halves, was how simple it turned out to be — how the whole frozen wasteland of our marriage was nothing but a misunderstanding neither of us had been brave enough to check.