“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I know,” I said.

And I did know, and I believed him, and it still changed nothing, because some things a person breaks cannot be repaired by the sincerity of their regret afterward.

There was no dramatic embrace.

No tearful reconciliation, no swelling music, no going back.

There was only a quiet, necessary, long-overdue conversation between two people who were going to spend the rest of their lives raising children together and would never again be married, and then he drove my children down the gravel road for their weekend with their father, and I stood on the cabin porch and watched the car go, and did not ache.