My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from her phone to her brain to her face to my brain to my face, back at her, and so on, that we were both a little more self-contained and impervious to the pain that flies at you from nowhere. For several years now, I have been reading Marcus Aurelius to help me be more of a Stoic and, if not entirely above pain, at least a little more capable of carrying on in spite of it.

Then Cynthia said one of the words that pass straight through my defenses, the name of our daughter, who had left a minute ago. Cynthia ran down the stairs, looking at her phone, uttering another expletive, and, with me following her into the living room, finally revealing what was going on.