Someone Had to Stay

I was about to watch it come apart.

And I have thought since about how much of a marriage is built on assumptions exactly like that one, untested for years because the tests never come.

Liam and I had a comfortable life; we had never, in our whole time together, faced a real emergency, a genuine middle-of-the-night crisis that would show us what the other person was made of when it counted.

So I had assumed the best about him, filled in the blank with the man I hoped he was, and mistaken the absence of any test for proof that he would pass one.