She apologized for the accusation. I accepted the apology, and we kept going. The fact that we could handle a disagreement without contempt made me briefly wonder whether we had made the wrong decision. Then I remembered how much it had taken for us to reach that ordinary level of respect. I was glad we'd found a way to speak to each other. I did not mistake it for proof that we should remain married.
Natalie continued individual counseling, something she told me about without asking for credit. She said she was trying to understand why she had treated attention as a kind of oxygen and why she'd felt so threatened whenever I asked her to consider someone else's needs. I hoped she would find answers. I also knew those answers belonged to her whether or not I was there to hear them.
One evening she called to tell me that Adrian had left Northline for a job in another city. I didn't ask whether she'd spoken to him before he went. She volunteered that she hadn't, and that the relationship she'd imagined with him had never become the future she once thought she wanted. I listened, surprised by the absence of jealousy. There was still hurt, but the competition I'd never agreed to enter had begun to lose its hold over me.
"I think I wanted to feel like somebody different," she said. "He didn't even really know me. He knew the version of me I showed him."
I thought about the version of Natalie I'd held onto during the difficult months, the one I remembered from the art center and our first apartment. "Maybe we were both doing that," I said. "Trying to live with an idea of a person instead of the person standing in front of us."
She was quiet for a while. "I wish we had understood that sooner."
"Me too."
As winter moved toward spring, the house went on the market. I spent weekends making repairs I'd put off while our marriage was unraveling: replacing a cracked tile near the back door, cleaning out the garage, painting the trim in the guest room. It was strange to work so hard on a house I was preparing to leave. Yet each repair reminded me that a thing could matter even when you no longer intended to keep it.
A young couple came to see the house one Sunday afternoon while I took Pepper to Ben's place. They asked the real-estate agent whether the backyard got enough sun for vegetables and whether the garage had adequate power for woodworking tools. When I heard that later, I smiled. I hoped they would find the sort of ordinary happiness Natalie and I once found there, without imagining that the home's history required them to repeat our mistakes.