“I’ve been seeing someone.”

I remember exactly where I was sitting when my husband said it.

At our kitchen table. The old pine one we bought at an estate sale the year Josh was born. I was in the chair by the window, the one with the wobbly back leg. I had a pen in my hand, because I’d been writing out a list of things I needed to return to the medical supply store. A shower chair. A walker. A box of unopened bed pads.

My mother had been dead for nineteen days.

Daniel was sitting across from me with his hands folded on the table. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the salt shaker.

“Who?” I said.

He looked down.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“For how long?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Long enough,” he said.

Those two words ended fourteen years of marriage.

I’ve thought about them a thousand times since. Long enough. How strange it is that a whole life can come apart over two words. Not even a sentence. Not even an explanation.

I put the pen down.

I remember that the refrigerator was humming. I remember that the dishwasher was running, because I’d started it before he came in. I remember the light coming through the window, late afternoon, falling across the table in a long yellow stripe.

And I remember that I didn’t cry. Not then.

I just sat there and looked at him. At the man I’d married when I was twenty-five. At the gray coming in at his temples. At his hands, folded on the table, very still.

“Get out,” I said.

He nodded.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He didn’t beg.

He just got up from the table and went upstairs, and I heard him open the closet in our bedroom.