Ben sighed and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He wasn't sure if he was really conveying what he wanted to say. He shouldn't have brought up the word happy at all, he didn't think — but it was too late for that. This wasn't really about being happy, because most of the time he was happy. At least passably happy, anyway — close enough that selling the lie, as she put it, wasn't as uncomfortable now as it had been at the beginning of their marriage. The two of them could keep on like this indefinitely, there was no doubt, and someday soon they might even be happy together. But when he compared their relationship with another one, it was just... there was something missing from their marriage that he wasn't sure they'd ever be able to recreate. Seeing the way that Gregory Turnbull mourned his wife, or the way Art Pettigrew reacted to Desdemona's pregnancy loss really put in stark relief how different a relationship like that was from what they had. Melody had to see it, too, didn't she? She knew what the Pettigrews were going through. She'd seen how Mr. Lukeson had reacted to the death of her cousin.

But maybe it wasn't that different, for her. Maybe from Melody's perspective, their marriage did appear to have all the same components as those other ones, despite its rocky start. Perhaps when Ben had been faking it, he'd managed to convince her, too, and not just the outside world.

"It's not... it's not just selling it," he said, with some difficulty. "I don't even care about — I mean, I'm still doing that, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about here. It's more like..." Ben drifted off, trying to think of words for what he was trying to express. "Like there's something... I don't know. I don't know if I'm — it's something about me," he said eventually. "It's not even about us, necessarily. It's like — I think there's something about being a husband that I don't have. Like there's a piece of you that's set up to handle those kinds of feelings, and those responsibilities, and that — that providing and protecting business, and I don't have it. That's the part I'm faking," he said, with a shake of his head. He paused for a moment, letting those words linger in the air as though he needed to hear them aloud in order to determine if they were the right ones. Eventually, he added softly, "I do care about you. I always have. I'm not faking that."