And honestly, Sarah, I don’t care, which was perhaps the single most surprising sentence my husband had said to me in the whole of our marriage, because for two years he had cared about nothing so much as his family’s approval, and he had just spent a measure of it on me, on purpose, and found that he could live with the cost.

That was the line that changed things.

Not that he had defended me once, warm and righteous, in the heat of a bad night, but that he had done it again, cold, in daylight, to his own father, and had decided he could carry what it cost him to do so.

I did not throw my arms around him, and I want to be honest about why.

A month earlier I would have, instantly, flooded with relief and gratitude, eager to reward the smallest movement in my direction so that it might continue, and that eagerness was itself a symptom of the thing I was recovering from.