Five years of marriage, and Zachary still could not reliably remember that shellfish brought me out in hives that could close my throat — but he held, in perfect and effortless recall, the precise fact that his ex-wife did not care for onions in her broth.

In that one instruction was the entire truth of my marriage, laid out like a diagram.

Because memory, I have come to believe, is the most honest thing about a person.

People can perform love; they can say the words, cook the dinners, show up at the school functions, and mean none of it, the way Zachary had turned out to mean none of it.

But what a person actually retains — what their mind decides, without being asked, is worth holding onto — that cannot be faked, and it tells you exactly where their attention truly lives.