Not the heat of an affair — the patient, clinical cold of a man reading statutes about incapacity and thinking of his wife.

He was not trying to leave me.

He was trying to make me legally disappear, to convert me from a person into a set of assets with an inconvenient mouth attached, and then to remove the mouth.

The affair broke my heart.

This broke something else, something colder and more structural, and when it broke, the last thing in me that had wanted to protect him — the memory of the young man and the cheap coffee — went with it.

You cannot protect a man who has been shopping for a way to have you declared insane.