Matthias went into therapy, and not the performative kind — the real, slow, humbling kind that you can tell is working because the person stops explaining themselves and starts listening.

He sold the navy-blue nursery furniture, the crib and the dresser and the whole trophy he’d assembled, and he used the money to buy a real bedroom set for Anita, who had been sleeping in a hand-me-down bed for three years while we “saved for the boy’s room.” He didn’t announce it.

He just did it, and when I saw it I understood that something had finally rearranged itself in him — that he was beginning to see how badly his priorities had been bent, and for how long, and at whose expense.

That gesture said more to me than any of his apologies, precisely because it cost him something and won him nothing.

There was no audience for it.

He could not know I would even see Anita’s new bed; he did it in a week when I was still at Romina’s and barely speaking to him.