My brother-in-law, Yash’s older brother, once said he was shocked when his 7-year-old adopted son took apart an alarm clock to see how it worked. “No one had ever done that in our family,” he said. “We had no facility for wanting to know how things worked.”

Except he is no longer my brother-in-law, as I am no longer married to Yash: not for about a year and a half now. Yet I still call him husband, and he calls me wife. We are each other’s emergency contact. We share an apartment and meals, but not the bed. The bed sort of looms each night, but dissolves into nothingness, because the bed, or the lack of what goes on in the bed, is not discussed. Not yet.

Yash and I have known each other for 11 years. He is quite possibly the kindest man I have ever encountered. On one of our first dates, as we walked past Ben & Jerry’s, a contemporary Jayne Mansfield type strode out, wearing a pink off-the-shoulder angora sweater. Everyone turned: men, women, children, pigeons.

I asked Yash, “Did you see that woman?”

“Yes. She had a chocolate-dipped waffle cone with strawberry and cookies and cream, whipped cream, and nuts.”

It was then I discovered that Yash was obsessed with food (and, as I would later learn, with exercise, which is how he stayed so fit), and that he was someone I could love. When I took him to meet my parents, my mother pulled me aside after the first meal and said, in all seriousness, “I don’t think we’re going to have enough food to feed Yash for three days.”