In the tenth year of the marriage that had started as a transaction and become the truest thing in my life, we made an account.
Not formally. Not as a document or a ceremony. As a conversation, the kind we had been having in one form or another for ten years, in kitchens and on headlands and in the backs of cars and in the library in the evenings.
Rose was nine and Thomas was eight and they were at school on a Tuesday morning in October and the estate was quiet in the way it was quiet when the children were elsewhere, a specific quality of potential, the house waiting for them to come back and fill it.
Damien and I sat in the library.
I had the journal.
He had his coffee.
We talked about what the decade had made.
The marriage, which had started in a conference room and found itself
