It dies of its small silences — the hurts too minor to make a scene about and too real to forget, that you swallow instead of speak, one after another, year after year, until you have swallowed a whole marriage’s worth and are so full of quiet grievance that there is no room left for anything warm.

The nursing job.

The night he tried to talk and I rolled over.

Neither was a catastrophe.

Neither would have survived a single honest conversation in the week it happened.

But we didn’t have the conversation, in the week it happened or in any week after, because we were tired, because it seemed easier, because there was always a child to feed or a shift to make or a reason to let it wait — and a hurt you let wait does not dissolve.

It hardens.