“You took ten years of my children’s lives and you handed me a reason to be glad about it.” He pulled his arm out of her grip like it had burned him.

And then he did the thing I had not been able to picture in ten years of picturing this: he looked at me, and at the five children who were his, and he did not rage or grandstand or fall to pieces for the crowd.

He just said, very low, “What do I do.” As if there were something.

As if it were not a decade too late to ask.

And I understood, hearing it, the whole shape of the man I had married. What do I do — not what have I done, not how do I begin to make this right, not even, first, I’m sorry. Even now, even here, undone over his father’s grave with the wreckage of his own life spread on the grass in front of him, his instinct was to be handed the next step, to have someone competent tell him how to fix the thing so the discomfort would stop.