It was the cruelest gift I had ever given anyone, that concealment, and I was watching it detonate.

I mean that word, cruelest, and I mean it against myself as much as against him, because I have come to believe that my great concealment was not only a wound I let be done to me but a wound I did, in some slow and unwitting way, to him.

When you decide that a person cannot bear the truth about your strength, you have made a judgment about that person — you have decided he is too weak to stand beside your full size, too fragile to love a woman as large as you actually are.

It looks like generosity, that decision, and it feels like protection, but underneath it runs a quiet contempt, an assumption that the man you are shielding is a lesser creature who must be handled.

Alejandro felt that, I think, without ever being able to name it, for fifteen years — felt himself being managed, felt some enormous thing about his wife being kept carefully out of his reach — and it curdled in him, as being managed always curdles in a person, into resentment, and then into the need to prove himself the larger one after all.

I am not excusing what he became.