“I never told you,” I said.

They were the first words I had spoken since entering the lobby, and the room was so quiet that they carried to every corner of it.

“No.

I never did.”

And I watched him begin, at last, to understand the size of what he had done — that he had not married a burden and generously carried her for fifteen years, as he had told himself and everyone else.

He had married a woman who carried him, and his parents, and eventually even his mistress, and who had loved him enough, or feared his fragility enough, to let him believe the reverse for the whole of their marriage.