But I know the true answer is altogether more fierce.

I didn’t love my husband.

In the beginning, there was the facsimile of love best described as passionate infatuation. I wanted to be around Riley every hour. Share experiences together. Spend days naked in bed. Travel wherever our whims took us. I suspect the line between love and a desperate fear of loneliness is drawn in wet ink and easily smudged.

When I left Bury for college, damage seeped into every decision I made. At Northwestern, I studied both journalism and criminal justice, perhaps knowing on some level that writing about crime would someday be necessary for my conscience.

I dated boys who were the opposite of my father. I preferred the wild, the carefree, the spontaneous. I wanted smiles, not squints.

Riley was so different from my father that it was easy to think I was in love.

In those days, Riley had an adventurous spirit, a sharp intellectual curiosity, and an insatiable need to achieve. We met fourteen years ago. I was just twenty-three, two years younger than him. I was a few years out of school and was doing investigative journalism for the Chicago Tribune, mostly covering local crime. Riley was a friend of a friend, and I was immediately drawn to him the moment a group of us went out for drinks. His scraggly beard and mussed hair suggested a casual playfulness, yet there was also an intensity about him that drew me in. It was more than confidence. He had the air of a man who knew greatness would come to him after a mandatory waiting period. There was no arrogance, just a certainty.

My courtship with Riley was a frenzied whirl of sex and adventure, ingredients more addictive than heroin, at least until the high wears off.

Weekends away at whatever place we could afford, just for a different setting. Cheap hotels in the winter. Camping in the summer. Twice we even spent the night in our car, just because.

We moved in together after six months. He proposed after seven. I’d never met his family. He’d never met mine. I was swept away by a current I thought was called fate, but it turned out to be a riptide.

I should have known.

You know who did?

My father.

One month into our engagement, my father flew out to visit me in Chicago. He stayed at the Four Seasons, preferring that to the spare room in our apartment. Couldn’t blame him.

One dinner. That’s all it took.

One dinner at an expensive Italian restaurant on the Mile. I can even isolate the chunk of conversation where my father determined Riley wasn’t worthy of me. It went something like:

Dad: So, Rose tells me you’re an entrepreneur?

Riley: Yes, that’s right.

Dad: And what the fuck does that mean?

Riley (smiles): I’m cofounding a company that will bring clean-energy products to impoverished areas of Africa and Asia.

Dad: Clean-energy products in Africa? Jesus, son, those poor countries don’t even have power. They’ve got nothing, which means no pollution. You want the freshest breath of air you’ve ever tasted? Go stand in the middle of Burkina Faso and inhale. Probably give you an orgasm. They don’t need clean energy, Riley. They need energy.