My husband ignored my calls all day and came home past midnight, smiling like nothing happened. Then he calmly confessed what he’d done — and said he didn’t regret it. I stayed silent, finished my dinner, and went to bed. The next morning, what he found waiting on the table ended everything.

Your husband’s phone is probably dead,” I told myself after the fifth ignored call. “He’s in meetings,” I reasoned after the tenth. There’s traffic, I whispered to the empty kitchen after the fifteenth. By the seventeenth call at 11:45 p.m., I had run out of excuses for him and had quietly started planning his funeral. Not a literal one, of course. Just the death of the man I thought he was, the end of the life I believed we had built.