And she presents the final balance sheet, the true one, for everyone to see.

That is the job.

That is the entire job.

And what I understood, in the days after I left that hospital, was that my marriage had been one long discrepancy that I had spent three years being trained to ignore.

The coldness that did not match the word family. The control that did not match the word love. The money moving in ways that did not match the story I was told about it.

The bruise on another day that I had explained away, the flinch I had not let myself see.