Everybody says it comes back.

What I would say now — and I say it carefully, because I refuse to construct a story in which I was secretly miserable for years, since I wasn’t — is that the marriage had quietly become a very efficient household.

We had built a machine.

The machine ran.

Two adults maintained it.

And somewhere in there we had stopped being two people who were interested in each other and become two people who were interested in whether the machine was running.

He worked late.