I’d asked, “Where’s Jonah?”

He’d said, “Jonah’s gone.”

Jonah erasing me and Kayla from the story was a relief but also a burden, because I could feel Robert hating his own child, and I remember feeling scared. Yes, I was afraid of what my husband knew, but I was also afraid of my husband. He was so bitter and covered in thorns. Fear tightened the line between us.

Robert said, “You look very pretty in this light,” without warmth or love, grief or regret. He was stone and I was sand. “You look very pretty,” he said, and I knew the rest was best left unsaid. So much of our lives: unsaid and unseen. So many versions of ourselves mutated by other people’s minds. My own husband isn’t imaginative like Stuart, but now I have a stepson who’s hooked on Proust—a fact which, of course, makes me smile, because wasn’t it Proust who said, “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us”? So maybe Robert will never be the one to whom I can say, Isn’t that just too perfect? But Jonah might be.

And then, of course, the laundry: finding confirmation of Robert’s inner world, folded and hidden in the back pockets of his jeans. “Managing Emotional Shock.” “The Science of Acceptance.” Being reminded that he struggles and copes in his own way. Wanting so badly to soothe his pain. Recognizing that he, too, guards an inner world, just so he can keep secrets with himself. Understanding that it’s not my job to storm his fortress.

At Penn Station, I take my place in the ticket queue. Once again, my mind returns to the night we sat in the den, watching each other watch the other. The sun was setting, and I was afraid, but then came that strange flash of clarity. It was as though two songs in different keys had landed on the exact same chord at the exact same time, and in that moment, I almost believed this was the point of it all. So much dissonance, so much noise, all in hot pursuit of alignment, and when we find it, for a fleeting moment we are one and the same. Is this why we cycle through ambivalence together, why we create and clean messes together, why we volley words and feelings back and forth, aiming for the places that best reflect us in each other—even as we shield these reflections from judgment and scorn out there in the world? Even as we distract ourselves from other people’s struggles in the world—those with far higher stakes, those caused by challenges not self-imposed? From these, we shield ourselves, too. Maybe my father is right: we plant obstacles just to have something to overcome, and in witnessing our breakdowns and consequential triumphs, we become our own proof that we’ve earned this good fortune and love. This life.