He traveled four or five times a year.

He was affectionate in a distracted way.

He never raised his voice.

He also, in the last two years, developed a habit of taking his phone into the bathroom, and stopped leaving it face up on the counter, and started keeping it in his hand at the dinner table, screen down, thumb on the edge.

I noticed.

I want to be extremely clear that I noticed.

I noticed and I decided it was work, because the alternative required me to blow up a life that had two children in it and a mortgage and my mother-in-law’s Sunday chicken, and because — and this is the thing I have had to say out loud in a therapist’s office more than once — because I did not have the energy.