Sometimes, I had to grit my teeth when people told us what a great kid she was, and John would glow with pride. He’d say things like, “Well, my mom loves poetry, too,” forgetting that I read poetry to our daughter (and no one had ever read poetry to me, you can be sure about that). He sure didn’t read poetry—and he was related to Robert Frost, maybe! He rarely made it home in time to read anything at all to Juliet.

The truth was, John didn’t do a lot with our daughter except provide. And he was a good provider. I valued that. Of course I did, and I still tried to be a good wife, asking him how his day went, arranging our social life because he certainly didn’t. I’d invite the partners of his firm over for dinner and make sure everything was delicious and beautiful, and he’d say, “That was nice, hon,” and then try to put the moves on me, and ignore the fact that I had just made a dinner for twelve people and was darn tired. But I’d have sex with him, and when he was sound asleep, I’d go downstairs and clean up the mess from dinner.

His personal habits began to scrape my nerve endings raw. When we were new to Stoningham and I had nothing but the house and volunteering to occupy my time, it was absolutely fine if he left a towel on the bathroom floor or didn’t rinse out the sink after he shaved. I was a housewife, so I didn’t mind cleaning up after him, though it reminded me that when we both worked full-time, I still did ninety-five percent of the housework.

But now, raising our beautiful, wonderful daughter, that towel and sink told me he didn’t think anything had changed. That he was too important to put his own dang towel on the rack or in the laundry basket, that three seconds of sink rinsing was beneath him because he was a lawyer and I was just a mother.

Again, in hindsight, I probably should’ve said something about this.

His own mother appreciated me, because she’d been me. When his parents came to visit, John and his father would play golf, while Eleanor and I admired Juliet, because really, isn’t that what grandmothers do? She cooed and praised and held her granddaughter close. Once, when it was just the two of us, Juliet asleep in her arms, she said, “No one knows how much of your soul you give to your baby. They think it’s just luck or chance that your baby sleeps through the night, or doesn’t pitch a tantrum when you’re leaving a store, or knows to say thank you. They think you were tapped by a fairy wand, and they ignore all the hours you put in, shaping them.”