Because on about the fourth night Evelyn said one thing and then did not say it again, and it was:

“I am not going to work out whether I still love you at the same time as I work out whether you are safe.

Those are two different projects and if I run them together I will get the answer wrong on both.”

Nineteen months.

Then eleven more of something with no name that our friends found exhausting.

She moved in in the June of the third year, and she kept the apartment on Eighth Avenue for another fourteen months after that, paying rent on an empty flat, and I did not say one word about it.

She gave it up last spring.