Paul glanced once more around the room, at each and every person there, as if committing their faces to memory. He then turned and looked at me as if he couldn’t quite work out who I was. As if I was some sort of changeling. I’m right here, Paul. I’m standing right in front of you. But he couldn’t see me. I saw his confusion. His lack of recognition. And I watched as he considered the entirety of our love, weighed it in the balance, and decided to go. I watched as he turned, and walked out, and I listened as the door closed behind him, not even a slam, but a quiet click of resignation. I listened to the scuff and clack of his shoes on the front walk, for that’s how quiet the room was. I listened to him open and close his car door, start the engine, pull out of the driveway, and disappear down the street.

9

PAUL DIDN’T MOVE OUT RIGHT AWAY. THE THREE OF US lived as strangers in the same house for another four excruciating months. I lost the hearing with the school board. I kept going to the meetings on Sequoia Crescent. They became all I had. They were the only times I had any actual conversations, as Paul and Ashley had all but shut me out, I suppose as a kind of punishment, or maybe as a way of protecting themselves. Looking back, I realize our dynamic had become a Catch-22—they wouldn’t talk to me as long as I kept going to the meetings, but I had no one if I didn’t go to the meetings, no contact, no affection, no communication. Paul and I had tried never to go to bed angry with one another in all of our years of marriage, and so for us to now be living in a perpetual war zone of passive aggression felt like uncharted territory. We communicated through empty milk cartons left on the countertop, or by the intensity with which a drawer was shut. Even the sound of Paul urinating in the bathroom down the hall could feel like a rebuke aimed at me.