“Ethan! What the hell are you saying?”

He didn’t even look at her. He kept his desperate eyes locked on the crack in my door. “I’ll leave her. I’ll come back inside. We can go to therapy. I’ll fix this.”

The words hung in the stagnant spring air. They were pathetic. The desperate bargaining of a man who’d just realized his host body had suddenly developed an immune system.

“You didn’t leave because you were confused, Ethan,” I said softly, the absolute finality ringing in my voice. “You left because you calculated that I would always be your safety net. You thought I was weak.”

Before he could formulate another lie, the wail of a siren cut through the neighborhood.

Two black-and-white patrol cruisers turned sharply onto my cul-de-sac, their light bars flashing silently in the midday sun, painting the manicured lawns in aggressive hues of red and blue.