I did that.

I did it to myself, out of a genuine and misguided desire to make the marriage work, and I had gotten so good at it that I had nearly forgotten the woman I had folded away.

And then, on that examination table, injured and betrayed, with nothing left to protect and no peace left to keep, I heard her again — my own real voice, the forensic accountant, the one who documents and traces and refuses to look away — speaking up from wherever I had buried her, and I understood that she had been in there the whole time, waiting, intact, for the moment I would finally have no more reason to keep her quiet.

Getting her back was the great gift hidden inside the catastrophe.