I did not know, packing that bag with him, that I would spend the rest of the day protecting that drawing from the man it was made for.

And I have come to see that drawing as the truest emblem of the whole story, the small object around which everything else turns.

It represented the thing that was genuinely precious and genuinely at stake that day, which was not my marriage — my marriage, I would learn, was already over, had been over for a long time without my knowing it.

What was at stake was Leo’s heart.