And then the machinery of male pride, which is engineered with terrible precision to turn a small hurt into a permanent one: he won’t call because calling would be admitting he was wrong, or hurt, or that he cares; and I won’t call for exactly the same reasons; and so the silence extends, and each day of it makes the next call harder, because now there’s the silence itself to explain on top of the original thing, and after enough days the whole business becomes so freighted that reaching across it feels impossible, and two men who genuinely love each other simply… stop.

Forever.

Over nothing.

I have watched it happen to other men all my life and never understood it, thought them foolish, and then found myself doing the identical thing at sixty-three, sitting in my house telling myself I was fine.

That is how most of the estrangements in this world are made, I’ve come to believe — not by anything big enough to deserve them, but by two proud people each waiting for the other to be the bigger one, each mistaking his own cowardice for principle.

It took a woman to break it, because Trudy had never been infected with the disease; she just picked up the phone and stated the obvious, supper’s cold, get over here, and cut clean through three weeks of masculine nonsense with one sentence.