At My Wedding to a Man 40 Years Older Than Me, an Old Woman Warned Me to Check His Desk Drawer — Before It Was Too Late

Part One: Before Richard

The thing about exhaustion is that it changes your vision.

Not dramatically — not the way illness or grief changes it, with sudden, vertiginous shifts. It changes it slowly, incrementally, the way a room dims as the afternoon advances, so gradually that you don’t notice until you reach for a light switch and realize you have been sitting in near-darkness for an hour, adapting without knowing it.

Elena Marsh had been adapting for three years.

She was thirty years old, which is young by most measures and felt, on certain mornings, ancient. She had two children: Mason, who was seven and had recently become interested in weather patterns with a focused intensity that she found both endearing and logistically complicated, and Ava, who was five and had decided, in the way that five-year-olds decide things — completely, without appeal — that oatmeal was beneath her. She had a two-bedroom apartment in a building where the elevator was unreliable and the neighbor above them had a dog whose schedule was apparently nocturnal. She had a job as an accountant at a mid-sized consulting firm, which she was good at, which paid her decently, which was not enough.

The math of her life was simple and unforgiving: income minus rent minus childcare minus groceries minus the rotating series of small emergencies that constitute the infrastructure of raising two children alone left a margin so narrow that a broken tooth or a car repair or a single unexpected week of illness could tip it entirely. She had tipped it twice in the past year. Both times she had recovered — she was good at recovering, had developed a particular competence at it — but the recovery cost something that did not appear in any ledger, a specific kind of energy that, once spent, took a long time to rebuild.

She did not spend a great deal of time being angry about this. Anger requires energy she did not have to spare. She was, instead, simply tired in the way of someone who has been running a long race without being told how long it is.

Marcus — the children’s father — had left when Ava was four months old. He had not left dramatically. He had not left with a confrontation or a revelation or any of the narrative structures that might have made it easier to understand and therefore easier to grieve. He had simply become, over the course of several months, less present — fewer nights at home, less engagement, a quality of absence that preceded his actual departure — and then one morning he was gone, and the note he left was brief and addressed, she had always thought, not to her but to some version of himself that needed to believe he had been considerate about it. She had not heard from him since. She had stopped expecting to.

She had told herself, in the way that competent people with no options tell themselves things, that she was fine. That the children were fine. That fine was a perfectly adequate thing to be.

And then she met Richard.