That was a real wound, and if he had come to her with it honestly, years ago, before the wedding, before the forgery — I am afraid of my mother, and I don’t know how to stand up to her, and I need help — she might have stood beside him while he healed it.

People deserve that chance.

But he had not brought her his wound.

He had brought her the damage his wound caused, over and over, and asked her to absorb it: to pay the bills that kept his mother’s favor, to swallow the humiliations that kept the peace, to fund the estate that propped up his family’s crumbling pride, and finally to have her own name forged onto a loan because it was easier than telling his mother no.

A wound explains a person.

It does not entitle him to bleed on you forever.