Tod had left his wife and children for another woman, but Linda, his wife, refused him a divorce. She said that she still loved him and that he could still love her. One morning, after a night of empty sex and not much sleep, he drove to their house and saw his wife through the window getting the breakfast ready and the children off to school—as he said, “doing what she had to do to keep their life, her life, my life intact.”

He was overcome with a sense of her commitment to holding together a warm good life. He asked her that day to let him come back, recognizing that she was his very right, and much beloved wife.

Reader’s Digest, August, 1982