"I can do my work."
"I know you can. That's not what I asked."
I took Friday. For years I had treated every problem, personal or professional, like a broken pipe that would worsen unless I fixed it immediately. Luis had just reminded me that some things required time rather than force. His simple permission to be human nearly brought tears to my eyes, which was embarrassing enough that I made an excuse to get water.
On the drive back to Bloomfield, I passed the little brick church where Vanessa and I had married seven years earlier. The front steps were crowded with fallen leaves. I remembered standing in the vestibule in a navy suit, hearing her laugh somewhere beyond the doors before she walked down the aisle. That sound had steadied me more than anything my best man said that morning.
We met at a charity fundraiser in Hoboken when I was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five. I'd attended because a friend needed help setting up tables, and Vanessa had been hired to coordinate the event. A delivery van was late, a caterer had lost the correct address, and she was somehow handling all of it while wearing bright yellow shoes. She turned to me, handed me a roll of tape, and asked whether I was the kind of man who could follow directions.
"Only if they're very clear," I told her.
She laughed, and within an hour we were carrying chairs across the room together. At the end of the evening, she found me stacking the last of the rented glasses and asked if I wanted to get coffee. She was confident and funny and full of plans. I remember thinking that if I never saw her again, I would still be glad I had met her.
Our first years together were not effortless, but our difficulties felt shared. When my mother died after a long illness, Vanessa sat beside me at the funeral home and held my hand through every condolence I couldn't bear to receive. When she lost a job during a company restructuring, I picked up more overtime without making her feel ashamed. She studied for a new qualification at our kitchen table while I sat beside her reviewing drawings, and sometimes we'd exchange a tired smile over our laptops. We were a team in a way I had once believed could survive almost anything.
I still wanted to know when that changed. People sometimes imagine a betrayal as a single event, cleanly separated from everything that came before. Ours was harder to locate. Vanessa's attention had shifted a little at a time, and I had responded by becoming increasingly accommodating, as if giving her more space might persuade her to come back into it.