“I’m protecting our family,” Luke said, and he believed it, which was the worst part.

I have turned that sentence over more than almost any other from that day, because it is the exact place where I finally understood the man I had married.

I’m protecting our family.

He said it with conviction.

In his own mind, in that corridor, he was not the villain of anything — he was a man making the hard, unsentimental choices a protector makes, shielding his family from scandal and ruin, being strong so the rest of us could afford to be weak.

That is the story he was telling himself, and he believed it completely, and that belief frightened me more than any open cruelty could have.