I asked her about it directly, once, in a mediator’s office on the fourth of February 2026, with a mediator present, which is the only setting where she answers.

I said: “Why didn’t you call?”

And my wife of twenty-two years looked at the table for about eleven seconds and then she said the one entirely honest sentence she has produced in two years.

She said: “Because the second I called, it was going to be a thing that had happened.”

And then she said, “I know what that sounds like.”

And the mediator moved us on, and we did not go back to it, and I have had that sentence for eight months.