I nodded. The advice was unromantic, which was precisely what I needed. It gave me something sturdier than revenge to hold onto. Rebecca suggested a temporary written arrangement regarding the house and shared expenses, and asked whether I thought reconciliation was possible.
"Yesterday I would've said yes to anything that kept my marriage intact," I said. "Today I don't know whether the thing I want to keep actually exists."
"That's a fair answer. You don't owe anyone a faster one."
Outside her office I sat on a bench and called Sabrina. She answered immediately, sounding as though she had been holding her breath for the entire day. I told her I had spoken to an attorney and that we needed to agree on a temporary way to use the house while we decided what came next. She was silent, then asked if hiring a lawyer meant I had already chosen divorce.
"It means I want to make careful decisions," I said. "I don't trust myself to make them from anger alone."
"So you're punishing me with lawyers."
"No. I'm protecting both of us from pretending practical things don't exist because our feelings are loud."
She started crying again. I heard somebody ask if she was okay, probably her sister, and then a door close. Sabrina asked whether I could meet her that evening. I told her I needed another day. When she said she couldn't stand not knowing where we stood, I almost apologized out of habit.
Instead I said, "I didn't know where we stood for months, Sabrina. You can give me forty-eight hours."
That night, alone in the rowhouse, I went through old photographs. It was not a wise thing to do. Every happy image became a question: had she been thinking of him then, had I missed a look, had we already been ending without telling each other? I found our first apartment in a picture from 2013, the chipped kitchen tile beneath our bare feet, Sabrina holding a pizza box and laughing because we had nothing to set it on but a borrowed folding chair.
We had met at a community art fundraiser. I was helping restore the building's exterior stonework, and Sabrina was volunteering because a friend worked for the nonprofit that owned it. She had stood beside a crooked display and told me, with complete seriousness, that the building deserved better lighting. I had answered that the building deserved a roof that didn't leak. She'd laughed so hard she spilled her wine on her own sleeve.
The woman in that photograph had once fallen asleep on my shoulder in a movie theater because she was working two jobs and had been awake since five. She had brought me soup when I had the flu, defended my decision to start a company when my father thought it was foolish, and held my hand at my grandfather's funeral. Our marriage had not been ten years of lies. That would have been easier to understand. It had been years of real tenderness followed by a series of real choices I had not been allowed to know about.