The Night My Marriage Fell Apart

I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the big leather chair in our den in the dark, my brain buzzing with jet lag and worry, listening to the sounds that our beautiful, crumbling house made in the night. It was the manse for a long-fallen church, and I’d been taking it apart and putting it back together piece by piece. The spine of our house was a 60-foot beam that ran the length of the basement ceiling, hand-carved from the trunk of an ancient Douglas fir. It was magnificent timber. For more than a hundred years, it had held the weight of however many families. Now it held the weight of mine, and it groaned like a wooden ship.

It was the summer of 2016, and I’d just come home from covering the European Football Championship in France for ESPN, a glorious assignment. I’d been based in Paris, and they’d put me up in a boutique hotel that lent its guests bicycles with baskets on the front for their trips to the boulangerie. When I had a game to cover farther afield, I’d take a fast train to Lyon or Toulouse and maybe stay a night or two and eat outdoors somewhere, and then I’d return to Paris for a few more days in the capital’s sun. I’d take long walks along the Seine and tell myself how lucky I was.