asked whether I could transfer three hundred and forty dollars toward the monthly loan payment while she stabilized her cash flow. She stressed that it would be temporary. I set up an automatic transfer from my personal checking account to the payment account she used, noted the amount in my budget, and did not bring it up again unless we were reviewing expenses. Eight months passed, and the word temporary quietly disappeared from our conversations.
There were moments when I wondered whether the arrangement had become too one-sided. I would finish a long tour, come home exhausted, and find a delivery of expensive branded packaging material on the kitchen table. Jade would be excited about its quality, the embossed logo, the exact shade of cream she had chosen, and I would be calculating whether our heating bill had already posted. But she also worked hard, and I knew what it felt like to pursue something that required years before the rewards arrived.
My promotion had taken time. Her business might take time too. I kept returning to the same conclusion: if we were building a life, supporting each other through uneven periods was part of the agreement.
When I proposed, I believed that agreement was mutual. I had saved for the ring without borrowing a dollar, choosing a simple setting around a diamond Jade had admired months earlier in a jeweler's window. The price was eight thousand four hundred dollars, paid in full from savings I had kept separate for that purpose. The salesman offered financing, but I declined. I remember placing the receipt in the back of my filing drawer beside my truck title and the documents from my lieutenant examination. Jade cried when I asked her to marry me at the end of a hiking trail, and she said yes before I had finished speaking.
For several weeks afterward, she seemed happier than I had ever seen her. She called her mother, Brenda, from the passenger seat on the drive home, holding her left hand up to the sunlight as if the ring could somehow be shown through a telephone. She sent pictures to her younger sister, Tessa, and spent an evening telling me about the wedding she had imagined since college. I watched her talk, knowing I would have agreed to almost any reasonable ceremony simply because she looked so certain about our future.
The wedding itself was not the point to me. The marriage was. At the time, I was sure she understood the distinction.
We did not have a perfect relationship, and I am not going to pretend otherwise simply because of what happened later. I could be too practical when she wanted reassurance. I sometimes approached emotional disagreements as problems to be organized into steps, which made her feel unheard. There were occasions when I had been distracted by the station or exhausted after a difficult call and had offered less attention than she needed. I tried to recognize those things because a person can be betrayed and still have flaws. What changed our relationship was not that I