Underneath the tenderness there was a great deal we had never said, and it had to come up before anything real could be rebuilt, and some of it was hard.

It came up over those weeks, in the kitchen and the car and the dark before sleep, the whole buried inventory of two people’s small unspoken hurts.

I finally told him the thing I’d carried for thirty years — that I gave up the nursing supervisor job, the one I’d wanted my whole career, the year his mother got sick, because someone had to, and it was always going to be me, and he had never once acknowledged that I’d laid it down, had never said thank you or I’m sorry or I know what that cost you.

He was quiet a long time when I said it.