Every time a dispatcher called her at nine at night because only Marlowe could untangle the problem, he heard it as a verdict on himself.

Every time her name came up at a family dinner with respect, he felt the respect as a subtraction from his own small store of it.

He never said any of this.

He would not have known how, and he was ashamed of it even then, in the dim way a person is ashamed of a feeling they refuse to examine.

But the feeling was there, doing its quiet work, hollowing out a space inside the marriage.

And that space was exactly the space his mother knew how to fill.