We talked for the better part of an hour, which was longer than Marva wanted and about right for what needed saying, and I will not pretend it was a grand reckoning, because it wasn’t.

It was two aging people talking quietly about a marriage that had failed slowly, and there is no opera in that, only a kind of tired honesty.

He apologized.

Not well, at first — the first apologies were the kind that are at bottom about the apologizer, I can’t believe I did this, I can’t live with myself, the guilt reaching for reassurance — and I did not reassure him, because I was done managing his feelings, and in the space where my reassurance would have gone he found, eventually, a better and smaller apology, which was simply: “I never saw you.

I had a wife who was worth ten of me and I treated her like the furniture I’d stopped noticing, and I will know that about myself for the rest of my life.” That one I received.

I did not forgive him to make him feel better; I want to be clear about that, because I think a lot of what passes for forgiveness is just the disappearing woman’s old habit of tidying up other people’s discomfort.