She noticed, holding the phone in the quiet of the room he’d never understood, that she felt no anger toward him — and that its absence was itself a kind of answer.

For years she had assumed that the day everything came apart would be the day she finally let herself be furious, that all the swallowed corrections and edited introductions would come pouring out at once.

But the fury never arrived.

What arrived instead was something closer to the feeling of setting down a bag you’ve carried so long you’d stopped noticing its weight, and only understand how heavy it was in the lightness after.

Crispin was not, she saw now, a villain in the way stories liked their villains.

He was something more ordinary and more disappointing: a man who had found it convenient to believe his wife was small, and had never examined the belief because examining it would have cost him the story he preferred about himself.