And he answered all of it with the same dreadful, patient calm, as though I were a spreadsheet that kept returning an inconvenient value.

“You weren’t supposed to get inside so quickly,” he said.

“But you’ve always been too dutiful for your own good.” And then the intercom went dead, and I understood that the man I had married had never, on some fundamental level, existed at all — that I had spent eight years loving a mask worn by an animal that was, at that very moment, doing math about my death.

Chapter 4 — I Would Not Sit Down