“And that,” Brenda said, “is the core problem, isn’t it.

You keep treating your past as if it deserves exactly the same amount of space as our future.” “Hannah is not my past, Brenda,” I said.

“She is my present and my future.” Brenda shook her head, and then she said the sentence that I think I already knew, in my gut, would be the end of us.

“Once we have children of our own,” she said, “I am not going to raise them inside a museum dedicated to the woman you married first.” A museum.

That is what she called the home where my daughter’s mother’s photographs hung on the walls.