But over the past year I had started wrapping his dinner before I even sat down to eat my own.
There is a specific moment I keep. Standing at the counter with cling film in one hand at twenty past seven, before I had touched my own plate, because I already knew.
He missed Thanksgiving. He missed our anniversary, the twelfth, which he has never missed.
He missed our daughter’s eighth birthday, and she asked me at bedtime whether Daddy had forgotten or whether somebody was very ill.
I said somebody was very ill.
She thought about that for a bit and then she said: that’s all right then.
Eight years old, and she took the answer and put it away and went to sleep, because that is what we had trained her to do with that answer.
Some nights he did not come home at all.
