I noticed it on a Tuesday.
The texts got shorter. Not dramatically — not in a way I could point to and say there, that's where it changed. Just incrementally. Responses that had been paragraphs became sentences. The calls that had been happening every few nights stopped being initiated by him. When I called, he picked up, and he was warm and present and said the right things, but underneath it was something careful. Something managed.
I knew that quality of careful. I'd felt it from other people before. It was the specific texture of someone deciding how much of themselves to give.
I told myself I was imagining it.
I told myself this on Wednesday and Thursday and by Friday I had constructed an elaborate internal argument for why everything was completely fine that was so detailed and t
