“I’m not being difficult. I mean I genuinely don’t know how. My whole professional life is somebody tells me a problem and I fix it in the room. That’s the skill.

That’s what I’m for.” He looked at his hands. “And I think what you’re telling me is that you married a man who fixed everything in the room, and you can smell it now, and I’ve got the same smell.”

That was more self-aware than I had expected and it was also not a plan.

We are still together. It is not resolved. He is trying, in the specific, effortful, slightly comic way of a man who has set himself a task — he now says do you want me to respond to that or just hear it, out loud, every time, and it is clumsy and it works about seventy percent of the time and I have decided that seventy percent, said out loud, is worth more than a hundred percent assumed.

I am not marrying him. I want that recorded because two people have asked in the last six months and both of them phrased it as a question about my healing.

Chapter 18 — The List

Everett drives.