“Things were fine with Roshan. Great, even. And then all of a sudden, we had this terrible fight that I thought happened because we were both stressed with finals,” Suhani says. “He started yelling at me, like, really yelling. I was in shock because he had never spoken like that before, no matter how heated our arguments got. He apologized after and begged me to forgive him, said he was really worried about his evaluations from his clinical rotations. And then for a while, we were fine again. It was like it never happened. He went back to being his sweet and caring self, the person I thought I knew.”

When things were good with Roshan, they were really good. Suhani had dated a few guys by then—all of them sweet and caring—but none of them sent her on an emotional high like Roshan did.

“But then weeks later, he yelled again,” she says. “And again. I didn’t realize then that he escalated each time. He started using curse words and eventually progressed to a lot of name-calling.”

Suhani’s hands shake as Roshan’s words ring in her ears. “I know how irrational this is going to sound, but I was able to pretend that all that behavior came from another person altogether, the wounded Roshan, not really the guy I was dating.”

“It’s not irrational at all. You compartmentalized,” Zack says. “You put those feelings and that part of him away.”

The tension in Suhani’s chest starts to unravel as she soaks in her husband’s words. She didn’t realize how badly she needed to hear that: the way she felt was valid.

“Did it stay that way?” Zack’s voice is soft. “Normal, then explosive, then normal again?”

That’s the exact language Zack once used when he told Suhani how his dad was: normal, then explosive. He, Barbara, and his sisters walked on eggshells whenever his dad came home from work, not knowing which version of him they’d get. One Dr. Kaplan took them out for ice cream, made corny jokes, and was devoted to his patients. The other Dr. Kaplan threw glasses that shattered on the tiled kitchen floor, screamed until his face was beet red, and left the house for hours, reeking of vodka when he returned.

Suhani sees now that things are a lot clearer when someone only offers you their worst parts. When things are clearly terrible, you leave. When things are great, you stay. When your relationship becomes a pendulum between terrible and great, you sway with it, infused with enough hope to see which way it’ll go.