The insight I had, the night I stopped crying and started planning, was that I had the direction of causation backward.

I had been waiting for Julian to feel differently so that he would act differently.

What actually worked was to make him act differently, through a contract he signed to avoid divorce, and to let the acting change the feeling.

Because when he began, reluctantly, resentfully, to do the actual work, night after night, the six-to-ten shift, the bottles, the bath, the endless soothing of two crying infants, the understanding I had been unable to give him through years of explanation arrived in a matter of weeks, delivered not by my words but by his own aching arms and his own lost sleep.

He could not argue with his own exhaustion.