Martha and Mark proceeded, in the end, with a formal legal separation.

It was not vengeful, and it was not loud; it was simply the honest acknowledgment of a trust that had broken in a place that does not easily mend.

Mark, in time, found a new management position, and did the work in therapy, and became, in time, someone more honest than the man who had left the house at seven-thirty every morning to sit in a library.

But the thing that had run their household for so long — the assumption that a hard truth was better hidden than spoken, that love meant managing what the people you loved were allowed to know — that was gone, dismantled to the foundation and not rebuilt.