I wasn’t sure I ever had.” And Hal and I sat there, gut-punched, because our children had watched the whole long drift, had grown up inside a house where their parents were affectionate managers and nothing more, and had absorbed it as normal, as what marriage was — two people being a good team and calling it enough.

I thought about Shea, thirty-two and still single, and I wondered for the first time whether some of that was this, whether she’d never married because the only marriage she’d ever seen up close was two kind colleagues sharing a house, and why would you sign up for that.

It was not too late for Hal and me.

But there was a debt in it I hadn’t reckoned — that the way we’d loved each other, or failed to, had been the first and loudest lesson our children ever got about what love looks like.

I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to give them a better one, even now, even this late.