here is my husband in all this? He’s fine with it, he says. He says he doesn’t care if I cheat as long as I’m happy, because then he has a happier wife and his life is more pleasant. He says this more than once and I believe him. My soul deeply needs to believe him. And it’s not until many years later that I realize that his cavalier attitude is deeply hurtful in ways I’m still getting over. Maybe it masked his own disillusion – or his own philandering. I never knew and never want to know.

I didn’t cheat. But that didn’t stop the cataracts from being stripped from my eyes. It was as though I’d become completely alienated from the third dimension and now I was seeing the world for the first time. One day, as Keith and the kids and I hike, I spot a patch of purple wildflowers, tucked into a mountain crevice, and think I have never really seen purple flowers like that ever before.

I hadn’t noticed when the world started to go monochromatic. But one day I saw the purple flowers. Like in the movie Pleasantville, I started to see color.