That is the horror of it.

There was no confrontation and no near miss.

I made dinner.

He watched a series about mountaineering.

On the second Sunday we drove out to look at a barn conversion because I was thinking about bidding on it, and he was interested and asked good questions, and I sat in the passenger seat of my husband’s car for fifty minutes talking about roof pitches with a man who had stood over my bed with a needle.

I slept in the guest room for the first four nights and then went back into our bed, because Ruiz was right that changing anything was a signal, and because on the fifth night Christopher said, lightly, from the doorway, “Are we doing this now?