She was going to take my father with her.

That is the detail that undoes me every time.

She was not running from my family.

She was carrying out of it the two people in it who could not protect themselves, because she had decided their safety was hers to guarantee, and no one else in that house had decided any such thing.

People had spent years calling my wife dramatic.

Oversensitive.

Paranoid.

My mother had a whole vocabulary for it — Odile making things difficult, Odile stirring the pot, Odile never satisfied — and I am ashamed to say that some of it had soaked into me over the years, the way a story you hear often enough starts to sound like the weather.

I had learned, without ever deciding to, to hear my wife’s fear as an inconvenience to be managed rather than information to be trusted.

And the whole time, what she had actually been was the only clear-eyed adult in that house — the one person who looked at what was gathering around us and understood it correctly and acted on it, quietly, carefully, at real cost to herself.