It happens because the alternative is unbearable, and because the person doing it to you is fluent in a very specific trick: he takes your legitimate question and answers a different, uglier one.

I would ask, are you hiding something, and he would answer, why are you so insecure — and suddenly the subject on the table was my character instead of his conduct.

Do that enough times and you learn to swallow the question before you ask it, because asking has become the thing you get punished for.

Add his mother’s steady chorus about how lucky I was, how devoted he was, and the ground under my own perception got soft.

For six months I chose the bearable lie — that I was imagining it — over the unbearable truth, because the lie let me keep my marriage and the truth meant losing everything.

What finally ended it was not a bigger fight.