We had been married three years at that point. We have been married eight years now, which means I have known Daniel for enough years to know him in the round — his patience, which is real, and his particular form of avoidance, which is also real and which is not the same thing as patience even though he sometimes uses one to explain the other.
Daniel is a good man. I want to be clear about this because the rest of this story can make it sound otherwise, and I don’t believe otherwise. He is steady and warm and genuinely funny in the specific way of someone who does not try to be funny, and he has always, until this year, been someone I trusted to be on the same side of a problem as me.
The problem is that “the same side” requires someone who will occasionally stand up and say a thing out loud.
We had talked about what our marriage was before Patricia arrived, in the years of ordinary life that exist before a crisis makes you examine everything. We had talked about it the way you talk about anything that is going well: infrequently and without the urgency that comes later. We divided the house, roughly, by preference and capacity. Daniel handled the physical maintenance, the things that required tools and time on weekends. I handled what we’d call administration — the bills, the schedule, the longer-term planning. We cooked together three or four nights a week and got takeout the others. We had a guest room that we used for guests: my friend Lena once, Daniel’s college friend Marcus once, and a visiting cousin for a long weekend.