My job is, structurally, an excuse machine, and I had been using it for eleven years, and a marriage where both people are gone half the week looked to me like a marriage, because it was the only kind I had ever had.

We had, in three years, one sustained argument.

It was about whether to have a child.

He wanted to wait.

I was thirty-six and did not want to wait much longer and we had agreed, in the January, to revisit it in the summer.

That conversation is on a list that I keep and do not show people.