“Your son gets his surgery.

And I get a wife that my children cannot control.” He said it as plainly as that, laying the terms out on the table between us like a contract, which, I would come to understand, is precisely what it was.

It was not a proposal of the kind a woman dreams about.

There was nothing of romance in it, and he did not pretend otherwise.

It was an arrangement, a marriage of convenience, each of us bringing to it something the other desperately needed.