Someone Had to Stay

But held.

Supported.

Surrounded by the invisible architecture of people who would catch us.

It struck me how long it had been since I had felt that inside my own marriage, how the house I had shared with Liam had come to feel, without my ever quite admitting it, like a place where I was fundamentally on my own, doing the work of two and carrying the weight of all of it, propped up by no one.

My brother’s ordinary sedan, driving us through the gray morning toward La Jolla, felt more like a home than the apartment I was leaving.