In the vows people say, in the picture I had carried of marriage since I was a girl, that is the heart of the thing: that when the worst night of your life arrives, there will be someone beside you whose fear and whose fight are bound up with yours, who will not have to be asked, who will be there because being there is what the promise meant.

I turned toward the kitchen believing I was about to receive exactly that.

I want to remember that I believed it, because it tells you what I thought I had, and what I was about to discover I did not.

Chapter 3 — Could This Night Get Any Worse

Liam was standing near the kitchen counter in his lounge pants, phone in his hand, and he looked up at me with the tired, faintly put-upon expression of a man whose evening has been interrupted.

“What did Dr.