The strategy simply arrived, in place of the grief, because that is how my particular mind protects itself from a pain too large to feel all at once.

I would feel it later.

I would weep, eventually, in that same kitchen, in the safe privacy of a life I had already secured.

But in the moment of the blow, the analyst held the wife’s grief for her, and used the time the grief would have wasted to begin, methodically, to build the exit.

It is not a better way to survive a betrayal than falling apart.

It is only the way that I am built.