Push you until you sent me back, like all the others.

That was always the plan.

It was the plan before I ever met you.

I think that admission cost him more than almost anything else he said that night, because it meant confessing that he had come into my home intending to break it, that the neat beds and the fixed porch step and the careful auditioning had all been, at the start, the opening moves of a plan to make me give him up.

He was handing me a reason to be hurt, maybe a reason to feel used, and bracing for me to take it.