In Time

We sat with those two wounds between us, his and mine, and the remarkable thing, the thing that saved us, was that neither of us got defensive.

We were too old and too tired and too close to the end of the runway to waste the reckoning on being right.

We just let it be true.

Both of us had failed the other.

Both of us were sorry.

Nobody was the villain.

We had just been two overwhelmed people who stopped reaching at the same time, and called the stopping peace.

What I learned in those hard weeks of saying the unsaid things is that a marriage does not usually die of its big fights.