“The truth is the truth, Estella.” And he left.

He thought I was bluffing, I could see it.

In eight years he had never once seen me like this, and he had no framework for it.

He knew the version of me who argued, who cried, who wanted to fix things, who could be talked around given enough time — the wife who had absorbed four disappointments and kept trying, kept hoping, kept making the marriage work through sheer patient effort.

That woman would have begged him not to do the test, or wept, or sworn her faithfulness.

He was braced for that woman.