Because it turns out that building something with somebody is not the same activity as meeting them for two hours on a Tuesday, and that the thing they had actually been enjoying for eight months was not each other.

It was the arrangement — the secrecy, the intensity, the specific electricity of a relationship that has no laundry in it, no water bill, no Sunday, no sick children, and no one asking who is picking up Sam.

They had been having an affair with a feeling.

And then they had to have a life with each other, and neither one of them had ever seen the other one do a dish.

She blamed him for promising her a future.