I told myself that a man who said those things in those rooms could be forgiven a great deal everywhere else — the accounts he controlled, the friends of mine who somehow drifted away, the job I quit because he said the stress was hurting our chances.

I gave up piece after piece of myself and called it love, called it sacrifice, called it what a good wife does.

There is one evening I keep returning to, because I think it was the moment I could have seen everything and chose not to.

It was the third year, after a failed cycle, and I was crying at the kitchen table, and his mother was there, and she said — not unkindly, which was the worst of it — that perhaps it was time to accept that some women simply aren’t built for it, and that Cassian had been so patient, hadn’t he.

And I waited for him to defend me.

I had learned to wait for it the way you wait for a light to change.