We got engaged on a Tuesday and I found out I was gay on a Thursday. That’s not really how it happened, obviously — you don’t discover something like that in forty-eight hours — but that’s how it felt, looking back. Like the ring on my finger was the thing that finally made the truth too loud to keep managing.
Her name was Beth. We’d been together three years, good years, the kind where people say “you two just make sense” at parties. And we did make sense, in every way except the one that apparently mattered most. I loved her. I still believe that. I just loved her the way you love your best friend who you’ve built a whole life around, not the way the engagement pictures suggested I did…