Dorian had not married her intending to hand her his mother and disappear behind a tired can everybody calm down. Gwendolyn had not moved in intending to annex the house.

Marisol had not said I do intending to spend five years teaching two people that there was no bottom to what she would absorb.

It had all happened the way most quiet catastrophes happen: not through a decision, but through the absence of one, repeated daily, until the absence hardened into a way of life.

The marriage had not been murdered on a July afternoon.

It had died of a thousand small, unpaid debts — every swallowed objection a charge to an account no one acknowledged, every act of patience a withdrawal from a reserve everyone assumed was infinite, every year of silence compounding into a balance that could never be repaid because it had never even been named.