That it would resolve, and I wouldn’t have to blow up all our lives to deal with it.

I made myself believe that.”

“And when she didn’t get better?” Martha said.

Mark closed his eyes, and this was the part, Martha would think later, that he had been most afraid to say out loud, because it was the part that could not be dressed up as panic or fear or a good man cracking under pressure.

It was just cruelty, chosen in service of self-protection, and he knew it.

Martha had spent her forgiving years believing that cruelty came from cruel people — that to do a genuinely cruel thing, you had to be, somewhere down at the root, a monster.