What changed was not the falling.

It was the getting up.

Before, when we fell into the old cold pattern, we stayed there — an afternoon became an evening became a week became, over the years, a permanent climate, because neither of us knew how to break the silence once it set, and so we just lived in it and called it our marriage.

Now we fall the same way, but we do not stay down.

One of us reaches back — sometimes me, and now, astonishingly, sometimes Hal, my quiet man who spent sixty-five years believing the manly thing was to say nothing and wait for weather to pass.