A decent man helping.

It was only when you laid them end to end, as I eventually would, on a printed page, that the pattern revealed itself — that Chloe’s crises shadowed my milestones with the precision of a shadow, and that Logan met every one of them by leaving me standing alone.

I told myself, for a long time, that I was being unkind, that I was jealous, that a generous wife would not begrudge her husband a wounded friend.

That is the story I was handed, and I swallowed it, because the alternative — that my husband would always, when forced to choose, choose her, and would always find a reason it was my fault for making him choose — was too much to hold while trying to build a life with him.

So I did not hold it.

I set it down, again and again, until Madrid, where he handed it to me himself, at a boarding gate, and could set it down no longer.