My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

Not the grief of losing someone, exactly.

The grief of learning that the someone you thought you had was never quite there — that you had loved a very good performance, given by a man who could set it down as easily as he set down my wrist.

The mask he put back on a second later was flawless.

But I had seen behind it now, and I would never again be able to un-see it, and that, it turned out, was its own kind of survival: you cannot be fooled by a face once you have watched what lives underneath it.\n\nAnd then, faster than I would have believed possible, he put the mask back on.

Chapter 12 — Thank God You’re Awake