“There’s nothing wrong with having feelings, Evelyn.”

“I either have too many or too few for you.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you know yourself at all,” he said.

I hadn’t told him I had lost my job. And that I was going to be an exit guide full-time. I didn’t feel like telling him any more after that. Besides, he wasn’t a person who liked hearing the details. He was a broad-strokes kind of guy. He made judgments about things pretty quickly, and it was usually that people had a long way to go to be evolved.

He always sort of acted as though he thought he had married a different kind of person.

I said, “Bobby, how do you avoid pain?”

Not as a trap, but because I genuinely wanted to know.

“What kind of question is that after I haven’t seen you all day?”

“That was the question we had to ask in group,” I said. “Today we talked about our answers.”

“What were yours?”

“The normal stuff.”

“Self-care or some bullshit?”

“Drugs are the new self-care,” I said.

“You answered drugs?”

“It was a joke. I don’t really do drugs anymore.”

“You smoke.”

“Vapors, not smoke. And that’s doctor-prescribed. I’m surprised you’re so puritanical.”

I smiled at him in a breezy way, but he wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

“What did you want to get for dinner?” Bobby asked.

This question, though innocuous, had become loaded in the way it does when a person has been in a relationship longer than a year. It is full of feelings of burden and also comes at such a frequency—daily—that it was hard not to mark the passage of time with the question. Thirty-six hundred requests for dinner, give or take, which had morphed into an accusation over the course of our time together.

It also made me feel like I had some fundamental misunderstanding of what it meant to be a wife. A wife was supposed to care about these things. A wife was supposed to want to move forward with her husband into a life filled with children, and a house, and couple vacations where other couples and their children also vacationed.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“What am I supposed to eat, then?”

I took a deep breath and looked at him and shrugged my shoulders.

He picked up his keys and left the house.

While he was gone, I filled out the paperwork to cash out my 401(k). Twenty-five thousand dollars could float me for a while, so I could finish my training and start working with clients. I wasn’t going to spend it frivolously. It was just a cushion. And then I could get enough money from helping clients that I could just put it back. I also had a credit card with a nineteen-thousand-dollar limit and no balance. Worst-case scenario, I reasoned.