We were learning.

Out of step, and stepping on each other, and learning.

I have held onto that morning, because it taught me what the difference actually was between the marriage that was dying and the marriage that lived — and it was not the absence of the old patterns.

We did not become new people.

The old grooves were still cut deep in both of us; Hal’s instinct under stress will always be to go silent and mine will always be to read the silence as the door closing and match it with a colder silence of my own.

Those reflexes did not vanish because we found a shoebox.