That was the real tragedy, and she let herself feel it fully, one time, in her father’s chair, before she set it down for good: that the marriage had not needed a villain to end.

It had only needed a good woman willing to keep paying, indefinitely, for a peace that was never real, and two people comfortable enough to let her — until the good woman, at last, on an ordinary autumn evening, in a quiet house that was hers alone, closed the account, and felt, where she had expected grief, only the vast and simple relief of a debt she would never have to pay again.

People had always envied her marriage a little, from the outside, and she understood now the particular cruelty of that.

They had seen a calm home, a gracious wife, a household that never seemed to fight, and had read it as a sign of a good marriage, when it was in fact the symptom of a sick one.