By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

My textbooks went into storage for two years because getting rid of them felt too final. Then storage got expensive and they came into a closet in the apartment.

Then I stopped opening the closet.

I want to be honest about something that took me a year of therapy to say plainly.

I did not do it purely out of love. I did it out of love and out of a plan.

The plan was that he would finish, and match, and be earning, and I would go back at twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and we would be the two-doctor household we used to talk about walking home from the library.

I never said that out loud to him after about year three, and I have wondered a great deal since about why I stopped saying it.

And there is one memory that has become the whole thing.

Year five. We were in the kitchen and I said something light about looking at reapplication timelines, and Teo said — pleasantly, not cruelly — “Let’s get through my next board exam first.”