It only took us different lengths of time to remember it — three hours, for me, and thirty-two years for her, but we both got there in the end, and we are both, now, exactly where we choose to be.

And I do not tell my three hours as a boast, or her thirty-two years as a reproach, because I understand now that the difference between them was not a difference of worth, or of strength, or of character.

It was a difference of resources and circumstance and the particular moment each of us happened to be caught in.

I got there in three hours because I arrived at that marriage already armed — with my own money, my own skills, my own decades of never having been made to doubt my right to exist.

Patricia arrived at hers, at a younger age, in a different era, with fewer options and a whole culture telling her that a wife endures — and then she was systematically stripped, over three decades, of every tool that might have let her leave sooner.