It was only when it lifted — two whole days with no one to appease, no one’s disappointment to head off, no cruelty to absorb and reframe — that I felt how heavy it had been.

The silence was not lonely.

It was the first rest I’d had in half a decade.

And in it, my own mind came back to me, clear and quick, the mind I’d had before I married into a family that needed me foggy and small.

That returning clarity was what let me sit down Sunday and read two years of records with the cold, sharp attention of an auditor instead of the anxious blur of a wife hoping not to find anything.

I wanted, by then, to find it.