Because, he said, Martha was in the middle of a brutal stretch at her firm — a large and frightening round of layoffs was moving through the company, and no one knew yet who would still have a desk at the end of it — and because on top of that she was spending every evening driving across town to help her own elderly father, who was recovering from knee surgery and could not yet manage the stairs alone.

Up to that point — and Martha noticed herself doing it, reaching for the ledge one more time — she could almost comprehend it.

A husband, seeing his wife stretched to breaking, making the flawed, human, forgivable decision to hold a hard piece of news for a day.

Twenty-four hours.

People did worse in a marriage and were forgiven.

But then Mark told her the rest, and the rest was not forgivable, and Martha felt the ledge crumble under her fingers for good.

He had been lying to her, he said, for more than two months.