This morning I told my husband a secret I’d been keeping for eleven months. When I was home for Christmas last year, the first Christmas we’d spent apart, when he was battling his darkest part of the depression, when I was so desperate to make him well that I would have given my own life to make it better, when we were in the place that I had never imagined we could possibly be, my mother crossed a line that she should not have crossed.

“He’s dragged you down for way too long,” she said. “It’s time to leave him.” I was crying and couldn’t stop. Her eyes were all over me. “Why? Why would you continue to do this?”

The edges of my words bled into sobs. “Because I love him.”

She shook her head, looking down in a flash of anger. “I can’t imagine how that’s worth it.”

This morning I told him, in tears, because it had to come out, because I’d said something during that time that he recalls as the most hurtful experience of his life, because we’re together and holding things back doesn’t ever help. I’d been trying to protect him, but he replied simply, without pain.

“I understand,” he said, squeezing me to his chest and running his hand across my hair. “She wants to protect you. I understand because I want to protect you, too.”

A few hours later, like magic, the anger that I’d been carrying towards my mother faded, and I sent my husband an instant message that said, “Thank you. You make it all better.”

Secret Thirteen, Revealed.