He doesn’t care for your teacher friends so you see them less.

Each accommodation is small, reasonable, loving even, and none of them is the moment you vanished, and yet the sum of them, over two decades, is a woman who has misplaced herself so thoroughly that her own husband can call her furniture on the phone and not think he’s said anything cruel — because by then it wasn’t cruel, it was nearly accurate.

That is the part I have had to sit with.

He called me furniture, and the horror of it was not only that he said it.

It was that I had spent twenty-two years slowly becoming it, sanding myself down, year by year, into something you could set in a corner and forget, and I had called that love, and so had he, and we had both been wrong in the exact same way for a very long time.

I have tried to work out where it starts, this disappearing, because I taught long enough to have watched it start in girls, and it starts younger than a marriage.