That is the part that took me the longest to make peace with.

There were real years in there — a decade ago, when we were both younger and hungrier, when he’d bring coffee to my drafting table at two in the morning while I chased a deadline, when we drove to the coast with no plan and slept in the car and laughed about it for weeks.

He was there when Anwen was born; he cried, and I believed the tears, and I still do.

I have decided not to pretend that man never existed, because pretending would be its own kind of lie, and I have had enough of those.

What happened, I think, is not that he was always a monster wearing a husband’s face.

It is that somewhere along the way he began to find the truth inconvenient, and each small lie made the next one easier, until lying was simply how he moved through his life, and the man who once brought me coffee at two in the morning was buried so deep under the man who booked seats 7A and 7B that I am no longer sure even he could find him.