Friends asked her to speak to their book groups. Our vacation ended and we went back to New York. I stopped running and focused on a sudden thought: Rick, keep that list to yourself. She quoted Van Gogh at the front, “It is my constant hope that I am not working for myself alone,” but the epigraph could have been hers too. When she finally sold the manuscript, it was like sending our firstborn off to kindergarten. The first few agents she sent it to didn’t respond to her e-mails. “Thirty Surefire Ways to Promote Leaving Van Gogh,” I typed. It hadn’t been a best seller, yet 20 years later it was still in print. I thought of one of her first books, To Marry an English Lord, about American heiresses at the turn of the last century who married into British aristocracy. Some of Carol’s books had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, some had dropped off the map, but that was no reason to give up. Isn’t that what husbands do? I knew how publishing worked. I opened my laptop and started compiling a list of how to fix things.

I returned to our summer rental, hatching plans. I hugged her and she headed down the shore, grieving.

She couldn’t give up hoping! But something, maybe a little lesson gleaned from 28 years of marriage, told me to keep silent. “Apparently not enough of them.” She turned to me, too angry to cry.

Make her see the bright side, even if it was pretty dim. I wanted to protect her and at the same time argue her out of her despair.

Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace