Ben took a breath. This was one of the things he'd kept coming back to, over the time he'd been alone at the club and trying to think through things. It would come in time, maybe, but how much time? And what would their quality of life be in the mean time? They couldn't just stay together for Nora's sake and think that everything would eventually work itself out. There had to be something between them worth building on.

It had occurred to him that it was probably impossible to know at this point whether the pair of them could ever have been happy in isolation. They were both always thinking about what their choices would mean for Nora, so they weren't ever fully free to make an unfettered choice based on how they felt. Even before Nora, they had always been bogged down with other things. Melody had no other options except him, after her parents had disowned her. That had always loomed large in both their minds when they brought up things like the possibility of divorce.

He wished there was a way to know, unequivocally, whether the two of them even could be happy together, but there wasn't.

"We get caught in these patterns where we feel unhappy and we don't talk about it and eventually one of us blows up," Ben pointed out. "We can try again, but I don't want to fall back into that. I think we should put some sort of timeline on it. If we try, and we're not happy, then we stop before we have another big fight."

---