I slept, all the way through, like a person who has nothing left to guard against in her own home.

I had not understood, while I was inside it, how much of my energy the marriage had been quietly consuming.

It is like the noise of a machine you stop hearing — you only notice it in the sudden, enormous silence after it shuts off.

For years I had been running a low, constant background process I never named: monitoring Damon’s moods, managing his family, smoothing the edges, keeping a peace that I now understood had only ever been peaceful for him.

I had done it so long that I mistook the effort for the ordinary weight of being alive.