She had thought she was protecting us.

She had thought a good wife and a good mother absorbed the horror at work and left it in the driveway, and brought only the smiling, capable version of herself inside, and that to do otherwise — to walk in the door raw and shaking and smelling of the ward — would be to fail us.

It is a terrible arithmetic, and I have since learned it is a common one among people who do that work: the belief that their loved ones need them to be unbreakable, and that showing the cracks is a kind of abandonment.

So she hid the cracks.

She hid them so well that the person sleeping beside her invented an affair rather than imagine the truth, which was only this: that a woman had been coming home every night from a war, and stopping at the edge of her own home to wash the war off, so that it would not get on her child.

Chapter 21 — The Alarms