They were not explicit.

In a strange, sick way, I almost think I would have found explicit images easier to survive, because those would have been only about the body.

These were about everything else.

They were intimate and affectionate and domestic.

He remembered the dates of small anniversaries between them.

He asked her how she had slept.

He sent her links to restaurants he wanted to take her to, and playlists he had made, and recipes he thought she might like to cook.

He had given her, in other words, the entire warm interior of a man, the tenderness and the attention and the thousand small daily kindnesses, all of it flowing steadily to someone else while I slept down the hall.