I didn't know what to say to that. Elise continued in a softer voice, asking whether I wanted her to bring me anything from the house and whether I was eating properly. I told her I was grateful but had what I needed. When we hung up, I sat in my truck outside the office and stared through the windshield until the windows began to fog.
I didn't want my wife's family to turn against her. I didn't want a campaign where relatives took sides and every past argument became ammunition. Divorce, if it came, would already be difficult enough. So when my father called that weekend after hearing something from a cousin, I gave him a short version and asked him not to contact Vanessa.
"She went out with her ex and told you to accept it or leave?" Dad repeated. "And you left?"
"Yes."
He made a low sound in his throat. "You ought to have told her exactly what you thought."
"I did."
"You said one word."
"It was the first one she listened to."
That silenced him. My father, Walter Mercer, had spent forty years working on city buses and was not a man who admired complicated emotional explanations. After a moment he asked whether I needed money. When I said no, he asked if I wanted him to bring a toolbox over to Ethan's place and help with anything. That was his version of love, and I accepted it.
The following Sunday we fixed Ethan's sagging backyard gate. Dad stood beside me holding the hinges while I adjusted the posts, and for nearly an hour we spoke about weather, lumber prices, and the way moisture had warped the wood. Then he stopped measuring and looked at me.
"Your mother used to say a home isn't the same thing as a marriage," he said.
I glanced up. Mom had died five years earlier, and he rarely mentioned her without being asked. "What did she mean?"
"That you can keep a roof in good shape and still have things rotting underneath. I didn't understand her then. Maybe I do now."
He handed me a screw and went back to work. That was all he said, but it followed me for days.
Vanessa and I attended another counseling session three weeks after she went out. I had insisted that we find someone neither of us knew, so we met with a therapist named Dr. Leah Porter in a bright office above a medical practice in Maplewood. Vanessa arrived carrying a notebook. For a brief moment, when she sat beside me and opened it, I felt an old, hopeful affection rise in my chest.