“I thought he was wonderful, you know,” Abigail says, “when I met him. I mean, I know I’ve always been…messy. Hard to manage. I find me hard to manage. And at first I thought he did such a good job of that: managing everything, including me. I loved how neat he was. How organized, how efficient. So disciplined, you know? Never made excuses. I loved all that.” She glances at me. “I don’t know when it started exactly, when he began to—to undermine me. Telling me I was letting him down, letting Sam down. That I was a mess. Unreliable. Embarrassing.” She swallows. “I thought, well, you can’t afford to be too sensitive in a marriage. And it wasn’t all the time. Then by the time I realized it was more than just a ‘bad patch,’ I’d already started to…to shrink, or something.

“It was all very gradual. It was like everything about me that once had seemed to charm him, he began to find irritating…intolerable, even.” Abigail goes on. She looks up, meeting my eyes. “I suppose the truth is he fell out of love with me long before I fell out of love with him—and yet there’s some masochistic part of him that insists on staying married.”

“Abigail…”

“It chips away at you, Gillian,” she says. “Living with someone who doesn’t…doesn’t even like you anymore. You get to thinking things about yourself.”

I glance at Mom. I don’t bother pointing out to Abigail that what she has just described, many people might term emotional abuse. Because right now doesn’t seem like a useful time for labels. I want to focus on my sister, not on the man she’s married to.

“You should have told us,” Mom says.

Abigail shrugs.

“I know you all think it’s because of me that we don’t visit more, but it’s mostly Dennis. He liked the way we had it in California, where I didn’t know anyone except the people he introduced me to.” She swallows. “I think what he wants is a wife with no family, no parents, nothing. He should have married an orphan, that’s what he really wants. Someone who has no one.” She looks at Mom. “He tolerates you, and he tolerates you, Gillian—because you’ve always thought he can do no wrong—“

“That’s not true,” I protest, and Abigail looks at me.

“Gillian, you treat him like he’s some kind of knight—”

That’s Mom, I think…but if I’m fully honest, I know I’ve secretly compared Oliver to Dennis many times and found my husband wanting. It embarrasses me now to think of it.

“But I guarantee you he tried a bunch of other places before he sent Sam up to you last week.” Abigail shrugs. She looks at me again.