(This is very deep - concentrate!)

Recently my husband and I separated, and over the course of a few weeks the life we'd made broke apart, like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces. "The new reality" was a phrase that kept coming up: people used it to describe my situation, as though it might represent a kind of progress. But it was in fact a regression. A plate falls to the floor: the new reality is that it is broken. I had to get used to the new reality. My two young daughters had to get used to the new reality. But the new reality, as far as I could see, was only something broken. It had been created and for years it had served its purpose, but in pieces it was good for nothing.
My husband believed