In the doorway of that room, with my whole new marriage four hours old, I was standing at a fork I couldn’t yet see the shape of.

Down one path was the question — what is going on, why are you in our bed, why won’t Julian look at me — and I knew, without letting myself know it, that asking the question would break something that could not be unbroken, would turn the first morning of my marriage into a war I did not understand the terrain of and might not win.

Down the other path was silence, and ease, and the preservation of the pretty thing I’d waited my whole life for, at the cost of pretending I hadn’t seen what I’d seen.

And I am ashamed to say I chose the second path, the way most people choose it, not out of weakness exactly but out of a desperate hope that if I just didn’t name the wrong thing, it might turn out not to be real.

Victoria was counting on that hope.

She had built the entire morning around it.