It becomes a small stone you carry, and then another, and then a pocketful, and then you are a person walking through your own marriage weighed down with a lifetime of stones you never set down, wondering why the walk got so heavy.

The work we did those weeks was just that: setting the stones down.

One at a time, out loud, at last.

It is not glamorous work and it is not comfortable and there is no way to do it but plainly, both of you emptying your pockets on the table and looking at what you’d been carrying, and being sorry, and choosing to put it down.

We had forty years of stones.