When Julian finally came home, four days later, he unlocked the front door like nothing had happened.

Like a man returning from a well-earned rest to the home and the wife he had left behind exactly as he expected to find them.

And the moment he stepped inside, he stopped dead in the doorway.

He stood frozen on the entryway mat, his tackle box hanging loosely from one hand, his fishing cooler slung over his shoulder, and I watched, from down the hall, as his brain tried and failed to reconcile the scene before him with the one he had expected.

Because Julian had come home braced for a particular tableau, the one he had left and no doubt imagined, with some satisfaction, during his four relaxing days on the water: crying infants, piles of unsorted laundry, dirty bottles filling the sink, and a hollow-eyed wife pacing the floorboards in a stained bathrobe, undone by four days of doing alone what she had already been mostly doing alone.