Chapter 29 — How Close I Came

I sit in my office sometimes and think about how close I came to blowing up my own family.

I had let insecurity and a rigid, cynical certainty blind me to the actual pain my wife was in.

I was so sure I was the wronged party — so sure the hidden shirt and the heavy perfume and the trips downtown added up to a lover — that I nearly kicked down a door ready to hurt someone, when the truth was that the person I loved was fighting a quiet, exhausting war inside her own head to save the lives of strangers, and losing pieces of herself to it.

I had gone looking for a villain.

There wasn’t one.