Angel and Michael’s separation

Angel and Michael’s separation is not a clean ending to their marriage but a painful distance sustained by opposing forms of love: Angel believes she must stay away so Michael can have children, while Michael resolves not to make her return against her will. The years apart expose the limits of sacrifice as well as the persistence of their bond; even after more than three years, Michael is still waiting for her to come home.

The Reasons for Leaving

Angel’s departure is bound to her belief that Michael’s hopes for a family cannot be reconciled with her inability to bear children. When she later explains the separation to Paul, she says that something was done to her when she was very young to ensure she could never have children. She knows Michael would take her back and that she would remain his wife, but interprets those possibilities as reasons to stay away rather than invitations to return.

Her decision is not presented as freedom from attachment. While apart from Michael, she sometimes experiences her longing for him as physical pain and wonders whether he is well or happy. She tries to suppress these thoughts by insisting to herself that the marriage is over and that she must continue with her life. The separation therefore requires constant effort: distance does not extinguish her love, but she treats that love as something she must deny for his sake.

Michael’s Response to the Distance

Michael’s commitment also changes during the separation. He prays for Angel not that she will come back to him, but that she will find God for herself. When he sets out for Sacramento, he resolves not to search for his wife there and never to go to San Francisco. His restraint contrasts with his earlier determination to retrieve her: this time he recognizes that forcing a return would not help her understand that she is free.

That decision does not mean he has stopped hoping. More than three years after Angel left, Paul tells her that Michael is still waiting for her to come home. Michael has told Miriam that he will not drag Angel back; she must return by her own choice if she is ever to understand her freedom. His continued love and his refusal to compel her coexist, making consent—not the disappearance of marital commitment—the condition he places on reunion.

The Marriage Beneath the Separation

Angel’s encounter with Paul brings the distance and its consequences into the open. She asks him not to tell Miriam that he has seen her, fearing that Miriam would tell Michael and that he would feel compelled to come for her again. Paul answers that Michael has promised not to drag her back. When he asks whether Angel ever told Michael she could not have children, she says that she did. Her absence, then, is not founded on Michael’s ignorance of the central fact she believes makes their future impossible.

Paul’s message that Michael is still waiting strikes against Angel’s conviction that the marriage is finished. She reacts with shock, but the news does not immediately undo her decision: she still believes her inability to bear children makes returning wrong. The separation thus persists not because the spouses have ceased to matter to one another, but because Angel’s sacrifice and Michael’s respect for her choice point in different directions.

Narrative Significance

The separation gives physical form to the tension between love and possession. Angel has repeatedly understood relationships through exchange and obligation; her earlier return to Pair-a-Dice was, she admits, motivated by the desire to recover her gold, and she had traded sex for the ride back. Against that history, Michael’s decision not to retrieve her by force marks a different understanding of marriage: he can remain devoted without claiming the right to override her decision.

The distance also brings the novel’s religious language into the couple’s practical choices. Michael’s prayer asks for Angel’s independent relationship with God rather than his own reunion, and his promise leaves the next step to her. Yet the continuing wait makes clear that this relinquishment is costly. The separation ends neither in emotional indifference nor in an uncomplicated resolution; it holds open the possibility of return while insisting that Angel must choose it herself.