The Platonic Society of Cast-Off Husbands

I hadn't planned to start taking in my friends' cast-off husbands anymore than I had planned for my husband to die. It was just what happened. One day he was fine, the next day he had cancer. It was never clear on which day those cells began to replicate and grow one on top of the other. Nor was it clear when my friends' marriages had began to collapse; when the little cells of their niggles began to cluster and grow and suffocate the vital organs of their relationships with their husbands. A marriage isn't good one day and bad the next, it's a slow process of decay, not noticeable at first. It nibbles away until the cancerous cluster of niggles has poisoned all the space and no one can live there.

The odd thing is all my friends are in their forties and so are their husbands. Some were a love match; some married because they were there when the old ovaries let out the mating call. In the end it doesn't matter, whether married for love or convenience, about four years after the big 40, the husband is asked to leave. It is usually news to him that anything was wrong and so it was that a succession of bewildered men began to turn up on my doorstep. I thought I would take them in and keep them safe until my friends wanted them back. I knew how lonely it is raising kids without a partner, and felt sure that they would change their minds given a little time and space.