It had crept in so slowly.

The apologizing.

The shrinking.

The careful watching of Zachary’s face for weather.

I had told myself, the whole time, that this was simply what marriage cost, what family asked of a person.

It had taken a four-year-old trying to give back a chicken leg to show me that I had been wrong about every part of it.

That is the thing about the slow kind of harm — the kind that never leaves a mark you could photograph, the kind Zachary would have been genuinely astonished to hear called harm at all.

It does not arrive.