He was ambling up the stairs imagining a minor domestic hiccup, a spider, a leak, a wife who needed a jar opened.

I was standing over what I believed to be a hidden criminal enterprise.

We were, for those few seconds, living in two different genres of story, his a light domestic comedy, mine a tense crime thriller, and the phone line stretched between the two genres like a wire.

I have thought about how often this is true in a marriage, in any close relationship, that two people can be standing in the same house, connected by the same phone call, and be living inside stories of entirely different weights, and how much of the work of loving someone is the constant, patient labor of getting your two stories to match.

That morning our stories were about as far apart as two stories can get.