Fifteen years of marriage, reduced to a signature he wanted secured before the anesthesia, in case I died and made the paperwork inconvenient.

And here is the strange thing, the thing I could not have predicted about myself.

I looked up at him, at his new suit and his good cologne and his leather portfolio, and my terror — the enormous, animal terror of a woman two hours from brain surgery — simply drained away, all at once, and something else came in behind it.

A clarity.

Cold, and absolute, and oddly peaceful, like the air over a frozen lake.

In fifteen years I had never once seen my situation clearly, because I had never once let myself.