My wife left the night I lost my job, telling me, "I married a provider, not a problem" — three days later, she was pounding on my door, demanding, "How long were you planning to keep this from me?"

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Delphine tried reaching out twice more over the following months, each time with a slightly different version of an apology, working through what I understood, eventually, was less about genuinely reckoning with what she'd done and more about testing whether the door had actually closed as firmly as I'd told her it had.

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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.