And I said the only true thing I had: “He’s forty next year and he’s a whole person and he did it himself.”

She cried against my shoulder in the kitchen of the house her son had bought, and I held onto her, and I understood that I was not just leaving a marriage — I was watching a woman lose the story she had told about her own life’s work.

“Don’t carry it,” I told her.

“It isn’t yours.”

“Everybody says that.”

“I know.

Don’t carry it anyway.”