That was worse.

She started clearing plates without being asked and telling me she wasn’t hungry when she was, and I had to take her to a woman named Dr.

Petrosyan for eleven months to unpick the idea, which she had constructed entirely on her own, that the household’s survival was now partly her responsibility.

I cried in the Wegmans parking lot in November, over a jar of the pasta sauce he liked, and could not drive for twenty minutes.

I went back to full-time work in January — a real job, in an actual office, as a staff accountant for a nonprofit that runs adult literacy programs in three counties.