[...] It had been a year since Toby had first asked for a divorce. His request had come not from anger but from the irritation of the hole it bored in you when you were lying to yourself. Each time he brought the topic up he had only been met with hysterical threats. She screamed at him that he would never see the children again if he tried to leave her, and that he would be left penniless.

“But why?” he asked. “You can’t be happy like this.”

She didn’t have an answer. She just kept threatening. He relented, terrified and even sadder. But somehow, as it snowed onto the skylight into their bedroom, and it was quiet in a way that it was never quiet there during the summer, a peace seemed to settle on her. They lay in silence, the air cold but the bed full of heat, and she said to the ceiling, “I think we should get divorced.” He turned over on his side to face her and he was filled with an aching love for the thing they had destroyed and tears were coming down her face and he wiped them away with his thumbs. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.