Falling in love with C was not gradual. Falling in love with C was encompassing, consuming, life-expanding. It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth. In those early days, he was a man frying little disks of sausage on a hot plate in a Paris garret, asking me to marry him. Making me laugh so hard I slipped off our red couch. Loving the smoked tacos we got from a tiny shack just north of Morro Bay. Pointing out backyard chickens from the garage we rented behind a surfer’s bachelor pad. Putting his hand on my thigh while I drank contrast fluid that tasted like bitter Gatorade, before a CT scan to find my burst ovarian cyst. Playing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a road trip, putting a cinnamon bear on our rental car dashboard because it was our mascot, our trusty guide. Our thing. We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?

In those early days, he was a man ordering room-service steak at the Golden Nugget after we said our vows in a Vegas wedding chapel at midnight. He was a man curled beside me watching our favorite obstacle-course program on TV, a man getting my face tattooed on his biceps, a man whispering in my ear at a crowded party.

He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.

My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.

Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.

She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.

When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.

C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head.

The first time C and I talked about my eating disorder, a few weeks into our relationship, he asked me how much I’d weighed when I was sick. Partway through my response, he broke in to tell me how little his wife had weighed by the end of her life. The memory was so painful it cut through him, like a splinter breaking through the surface of his skin. He had no choice but to say it out loud. In that moment, and many others, everything I’d lived seemed trivial in relation to everything he’d survived.

Still, some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.

Another part of me thought that making this man happy would be more meaningful than anything else I’d ever done. From early on, he said, “You are giving me another life.” Every time I felt a flicker of doubt, it seemed like a betrayal of this hope.

This was life under the shadow of the question mark. I spent long, agonizing hours on the phone with my mother, explaining my uncertainty to her, hoping she could help me decide. She asked, “What is your gut telling you?” But the question didn’t help, because my gut told me conflicting things at once—that we were soulmates, and that we were doomed—and my gut wasn’t a voice to be trusted, anyway. Recovery had taught me this. My gut wanted to drink and drink and drink. My gut didn’t realize that no matter how much I drank, I’d still be thirsty.

By the time I met C, I was sick of listening to my gut. I was ready to bring in upper management. Upper management said I was done with waffling, done with going back and forth. Upper management told me not to listen to my doubts. They were only coaxing me back into a prior version of myself.

Lying in bed, under the sloping roof of our Paris garret, C said we should get married. I said yes, because I was in love with him, and because I wanted my whole self to want something, no questions asked. I wanted that consolidation. I wanted to believe in love as a conscious decision more than an act of surrender. I’d spent years surrendering myself to feelings and I was tired of it. Surrender was just an excuse. You could bend emotion to your will instead.

This firmness would help me escape what one ex had called my “terrible, fickle heart.” Maybe not escape that heart, but discipline it.

When we got home from the botanic gardens that day, C was in a bad mood. I could tell from his gaze, and his posture on the couch as he swiveled toward me. I wanted to tell him about the greenhouse, the ways the baby’s eyes had tracked the flickering shadows, how good it was to feel my own pretensions interrupted by her shit. But I sensed he wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

Instead, I asked about his day. He said it had been terrible. “Hope you had fun frolicking in the gardens,” he said, his voice taut with sarcasm.

I didn’t ask why his day had been so bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers.

I said none of this to him—just, “Our day was great,” and let him read my tone however he wanted.

Was this frolicking—being with the baby all day? It rearranged my soul, sure, but it didn’t exactly feel like frolicking. I wondered if the only way to make the labor of my day legible to C would be to frame it as entirely exhausting. But I did not want to create a home where the main measures of love were hardship, expenditure, and burden; where these were the only dialects in which the act of parenting was spoken. I wanted language that could hold the wonder and the numbing exhaustion of the day at once. Sometimes it seemed like parenting was only visible to him as sacrifice.

His eyes got teary whenever he recalled the moment he’d seen me wince as the baby’s gums clamped down on my nipple. “You love her so much,” he’d said, as if my love was most visible to him then—in my willingness to hurt, this proof of my devotion.

A friend suggested that his anger was a sign of how much he’d loved me. As if love might curdle to anger with an equal but opposite intensity, like putting a negative sign in front of a very large number. But I knew that some version of this anger had been there the whole time.

One time in couples therapy, after I’d flinched at something he said, he snapped, “Don’t act like you’re fucking scared of me.”