The request for coffee was not an offer to make me whole.

It was a request that I help make him feel better — that I sit across a table and absorb his remorse and, by receiving it graciously, release him from the weight of what he had done.

It was, in other words, the same transaction our entire marriage had been: my labor, spent for his comfort.

He wanted me to do the emotional work of his redemption, one last time, for free.

And I was finished doing his work.

That is the thing about closure that people misunderstand.