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It had.
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The divorce finalized five months after that morning she pounded on my door demanding an explanation I hadn't actually owed her, given how little time she'd given either of us to have a real conversation before she'd already packed her suitcase.
I started dating again almost a year later, considerably more attentive now to how a person actually responds to difficulty, not just how they respond to comfort and stability.
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I met someone at Draymond's spring conference, a woman named Harriet who worked in a different department entirely, who once told me, months into dating, that she'd genuinely respected how calmly I discussed the layoff and divorce when the subject eventually came up, rather than treating either as something shameful to hide.
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"Most people either overshare their worst moments or bury them completely," she told me. "You just told me what happened, plainly, like it was simply a fact about your life instead of a wound you needed me to carefully avoid touching."
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I think about that pounding on my door often, the exact moment Delphine's fury revealed considerably more about our marriage than six comfortable years ever had. I understand now that losing my job didn't actually cost me anything I couldn't eventually recover from.
What it revealed, considerably more permanently, was a marriage that had never once been tested until the exact evening it finally was — and failed, completely, in the twenty minutes it took my wife to pack a single suitcase and walk out the door.
