Pick up milk.

Running late.

Don’t wait up.

That was the whole of it.

That was what eleven years of marriage had been distilled down to, on my side of his life: a series of logistics, a man managing a household appliance that happened to be a wife.

Somewhere in the last few years, without my noticing the exact moment, I had stopped being a person to Julian and become a function.

And the cruelty of seeing those two threads side by side, the tender one and the transactional one, was that it made the truth impossible to argue with.