“Are you going to say anything?” He looked away.

That silence answered everything.

It is a peculiar thing, to have a marriage end in a look away.

I had braced, walking into that office, for the possibility of a scene — for denials, for a fight, for the messy theater of a confrontation.

What I had not braced for was how quietly it would actually happen: a woman in my husband’s chair, my husband declining to meet my eyes, and the whole of fifteen years collapsing into the space where an answer should have been.

Chapter 3 — The Restroom Mirror