Ten days ago, The Accountant’s Wife sent me a text. Her husband had walked out on her while she was eight months pregnant with their fourth child and she was going into early labor. I flew back to Indiana and have been taking care of her and the kids.

We got her labor stopped and her husband to come back home, although he slept in the guest bedroom while we snuggled upstairs with the children. As horrible as all of that sounds, it was an amazing trip.

Marriage is a funny thing. I’ve known The Accountant’s Wife since we were both fourteen. I’ve known her husband ever since she’s known him, when they met in their early twenties. He’s a good man and I never believed that I could say that a man who cheated on his wife with one of her friends while they were adopting one child and she was pregnant with another—I never believed I could call that kind of person a good man but he is. And part of my job as a friend was to assure her that no one else saw it coming either.

But things happen in life. His father died early on in their marriage when they also had a newborn to care for. Out of a need to cover the grief, they had their next child less than a year after their first. They joined a church that encouraged them to adopt from another country, telling them that that’s what good people do. After two years of trying to adopt two children, the adoption fell through—their adoption agency was falsifying death records to try to get orphans out of the country quickly. A woman that they knew pleaded with them to adopt a different child, and they did, with that adoption going through a little too quickly, a little two easily after the first ones ended. They had no time to grieve their losses. They tried to pack forced joy, forced goodness on top of the pain. They, as a couple, were broken and were both seeking support and love outside of their marriage. And he, in a few weak moments, acted on it but she admits that it could have as easily been her to cheat.

When I arrived at their doorstep, I found children that were devastated and scared and parents that were sad and exhausted. They all flinched when the door shut behind me. But then something magical happened. I’d brought a full bag of ingredients to make ice cream sundaes and, by chance, the kids had never even heard of such a thing. It was as if I was quite literally a fairy godmother turning sadness into sundaes. Everyone began to laugh again. Dad, mom, kids, and me. We were all like children with our whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles.

We took the children to museums and restaurants and they whispered to their mom, “Don’t let her leave.” It filled me with such joy and also smashed my heart to pieces. At night, I’d help get them into bed and The Accountant and his wife would close themselves off in the spare bedroom to talk things out in little bits at a time. Little by little, I believe it is getting better. I hope so. They’re good people and deserve a good life for themselves and their good children, despite how bad either one of them might have been in their marriage. They both thought I’d judge them and, when I didn’t, of course I didn’t, they relaxed into sleep and giggles as easily as their children. And I thought, It’s amazing what grace can do. It’s amazing what love can do.

The kids tried to hide when it was time for me to leave. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I might have to hide from my job and my own life so that I could stay hidden with these kids while they learned the lessons of adults.

Secret Forty-Three, Revealed. Maybe we never stop learning. Maybe we can never expect or predict how love can be until it’s broken and built back from scratch. Maybe sometimes we all need cherries and sprinkles to remember that we have nothing if we don’t have love in our hearts for each other.