He didn't sleep. He lay on the couch — his own bed felt too close to the wall between their rooms, too loud with the absence of her on the other side of it — and stared at the ceiling until the gray light of six a.m. crept through the blinds, running the same argument through his head on a loop until it wore a groove.
You're not saving me from losing something. You're just making sure I lose you too.
She was absolutely right. He had sensed her correctness somewhere around the fourth word of that sentence, yet that awareness did nothing to quiet the fear bubbling beneath the surface. Intellectually, he understood precisely what he was doing — he had spent four years crafting a personality centered around managing every possible variable that could cause him pain. However, when the most si
