I pulled back from texting him on a Monday.
Nothing dramatic about it, no grand gesture, no deleting his number or standing in front of my bathroom mirror delivering some internal speech about finally getting my life in order.
I just slowed down. Let his messages sit an extra hour before I answered them. Answered short where I would normally have written him a paragraph, edited down to one word what would have naturally come out as three sentences.
I told myself it was healthy. That the Thursday dinners and the daily back-and-forth and the way I'd started unconsciously organizing my entire mornings around whether he might happen to be at the coffee shop near my office … that all of it added up to exactly the kind of thing a person with good sense pumped the brakes on before it went any
