"I've been keeping it safe," she said.
"Thank you."
She placed it on the table between us. "I used to think it was a way of telling me you were angry. I understand now you were telling me something had ended."
I picked it up and rolled it between my thumb and forefinger. "I didn't know exactly what had ended that night. I just knew I couldn't keep living the same way."
"I wish I'd come home sooner."
I looked at her. "Would it have changed what you'd said before you left?"
Her face tightened, not with anger but with recognition. "No. I guess that's the part I keep wanting to skip."
We sat at the table for nearly an hour, and she told me things she had never said without deflecting them into blame. She said she envied my calmness because she mistook it for certainty. She feared becoming ordinary, feared aging, feared missing an exciting life everyone else seemed to be having. When Adrian returned, he had offered her a flattering reflection of herself, and she had preferred that reflection to the complicated, exhausted person who sometimes came home from work and needed to be loved without being entertaining.
I admitted that I had envied her freedom, too. At times I resented how easily she said yes to plans while I worried about schedules and household obligations. Instead of telling her we needed to distribute those burdens differently, I had kept volunteering to carry them. In the beginning it had felt generous. Toward the end, it made me feel invisible, and I had grown bitter without always telling her why.
"I never knew you were jealous of me," she said.
"I wasn't jealous of Adrian. I was jealous of the energy you had for everyone outside this house."
She lowered her face into her hands. "I spent so much time asking whether you still loved me that I never asked whether you were happy."
It was an important conversation. I could feel that even while knowing it wasn't enough to change the decision ahead. I didn't forgive her in one great speech, and she didn't transform in front of me. We were two people finally naming what we'd hidden, long after we had learned to hurt each other with the silence.