My wife had not pulled away from me because she’d stopped loving me.

She had pulled away because her body had learned, in my absence, that hands meant harm.

And I have to tell you what happened inside me in that moment, because it is the hinge of everything.

For a day and a half I had been carrying a suspicion like a stone in my chest — the deployed man’s poison, the story where the silence and the distance meant she had found someone else.

I had let that story curdle in me over six months, and it had brought me home suspicious, and it had made me lift that blanket.

I lifted it looking for evidence of a lover.