My wife was paralyzed, and we hadn’t been intimate for four months. That was the sentence I kept repeating in my head, as if saying it often enough could turn it into an excuse instead of what it really was, a confession.
People think betrayal begins in a hotel room or in the backseat of a car, but it doesn’t, because it begins in the small, rotting places where self pity dresses itself up as loneliness and asks to be forgiven before the sin is even committed.
My name is Marcus Ellison, and before I became the kind of man I swore I would never be, I was just a husband with a modest life and a woman who made every ordinary day feel chosen.
My wife, Lauren Pierce, had a warmth that could turn a cramped apartment in Columbus, Ohio into something that felt like home, and she could turn cheap takeout into a celebration worth remembering.
