People asked me, in the weeks after, whether I had any regrets — whether fourteen hours wasn’t too fast, whether I shouldn’t have given it time, tried counseling, waited to see if the rag was a one-time thing brought on by wedding stress, the way Casper kept insisting it was.

And I understood the question, because we are all taught that marriage is worth fighting for, that you don’t throw away two years over one bad morning, that a good woman gives a man a chance to be better.

But I had learned something in that kitchen that I would not un-learn to make other people comfortable: that the rag was not the aberration.

The two years were the aberration.

The two years were the performance — the careful, sustained, exhausting performance of a man being someone he was not, in order to secure something he wanted.

The rag was the truth.