It’s only dinner, he would say, later, in the car, if I was quiet.

It’s easier this way.

He was not cruel when he said it.

That is almost the worst of it.

He said it gently, reasonably, as a man smoothing over a small bump for the sake of a long drive, and he genuinely did not see that the small bump was his wife, and that he was smoothing her down a little flatter every time, so that the ride would stay comfortable for everyone but her.

She had a gift for arranging her own convenience so smoothly that it looked like the natural order of things, and for a long time I had helped her maintain the illusion, because contradicting it would have required me to notice it first, and noticing was the thing I had been trained out of.