I had been getting to believe that my usefulness was a kind of belonging, that if I were valuable enough to them I would become, eventually, beloved.

I had been paying, in other words, for a hope, and the counselor made me look at the hope and name it and grieve it, because it was never going to come true and some part of me had always known that and had kept paying anyway.

Knowing a thing and acting on it are divided by a distance that can take years to cross, and I had stood on the near side of that distance for most of my marriage, holding the knowledge like a ticket I kept deciding not to use.

That was harder, in its way, than walking out of the restaurant.