“Sleeping.” And I watched my husband register, slowly, that the woman standing in front of him was not the wrecked, needy, grateful wife he had come home to collect.

She was someone else.

Someone he had married, once, and then, over six months of my own quiet disappearing, had forgotten existed.

But I have to be fair, and say that Julian was not the only one who had forgotten her.

I had forgotten her too, and that was the more dangerous forgetting, because it was mine to correct and I had not been correcting it.

Somewhere in the exhausting fog of new motherhood, I had let the woman I had been dissolve.