My name is Martha, and I have spent most of the past two years learning to want less.

Not in the philosophical sense, not as a practice of intentional minimalism or conscious simplicity, but in the practical immediate sense of a woman who has discovered, later than she would have liked, that the life she thought she was building was being built on a foundation she had never been allowed to inspect. When the divorce was finalized and the numbers were laid out with the calm professional detachment of a family law attorney who had seen this particular configuration before, I understood two things simultaneously: that I had been trusting when I should have been paying attention, and that the mistake, while not my fault in any moral sense, was mine to live with in every practical one.

I do not say this to assign blame, or not only to assign it. Blame has its place in a reckoning like the one I went through, the process of understanding what happened and why and what the shape of the loss actually was. But blame does not pay rent. Blame does not stock a refrigerator or explain to an eight-year-old why the house she grew up in belongs to someone else now and the new home is smaller and the neighborhood is different and everything is different and it is all okay, it is all going to be okay, we are still us.

I had signed things for twenty one years without reading them carefully enough. Not because I was stupid, which is what some part of me kept insisting in the first months after, but because I trusted, which is a different thing, a thing that is not a flaw but a resource that can be exploited.

In spring they will be green again, which is not a promise anyone made but which is, nonetheless, something I am counting on.

That is where I am.

Counting on the green.

That is not nothing. For where I started, that is quite a lot.

Estelle would understand that. Albert too.

I think they would both be pleased.