“Your father has been calling you?”

“Yes, but that isn’t it.”

I waited.

“Would you have taken him back if he had come home with an apology instead of his suitcases?”

I sat at my kitchen table, looking at the chipped blue bowl we’d bought on our honeymoon.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“A month after he left, maybe.

I would have wanted to believe him.”