It had also made him, though he would not have used the word, lonely in a way so total he had stopped being able to see it, the way you stop hearing a sound that never changes.

The Ravenscroft marriage had appealed to exactly that man: a union with no expectation of feeling, a merger of assets, a wife he need never let past the wall.

He had thought he was being clever.

What he had actually done, it turned out, was walk straight toward the one person on earth who could not be kept at a distance, because she had spent ten years being kept at a distance and he could not, once he saw it, do to her the thing that had already nearly destroyed her.

Her damage found the exact shape of his and would not let him stay behind his wall.

That was the accident neither of them had priced in.