My marriage is built on love, trust, and respect.

Love can survive a bad year on memory alone. Respect, once dented, can be repaired. Trust goes all at once and comes back slowly, by hand, which makes it the load-bearing one.

Building is the honest description of what happens. Foundations get poured before anyone can see them, across years that felt at the time like nothing much, a run of ordinary Wednesdays where both of you did what you said you would do.

That is the entire method: small kept promises, repeated until they stop being noticed.

Whichever of them has worn thinnest lately, that is this month's work.