I want that in here, because it explains what I was braced for, and because the thing I actually found was in some ways worse and in some ways much less simple, and I have noticed that people who have never been on the inside of one of these always assume the simple version is the bad one.

An affair, I could have understood inside a week.

An affair has a shape.

There is a betrayal and a decision and a door.

What I found instead was a family that had built an entire wing onto its life without telling me, and had furnished it, and had introduced a child to thirty-two people in it — and had done all of that while a man came home to me every evening and asked what I wanted for dinner.

I went to work.