I had spent a year feeling quietly abandoned by my husband.

And the truth was the exact opposite of what I had believed.

He had not been abandoning us.

He had been trying, in the most misguided and heartbreaking and tender way imaginable, to protect us, to carry the whole unbearable weight of it by himself so that we would not have to feel it too.

It was wrong of him.

I understood even then that it was wrong, that in trying to spare us he had robbed us of six months we could have spent facing it together, robbed himself of six months of being held.