She'd begun to keep a mental tally of all the little gestures and omissions that indicated he might be pulling away: a sudden, obsessive interest in his phone, a distracted, mechanical quality to his embraces, increasingly vague replies to her questions and unreadable facial expressions. Each occurrence triggered a small alarm in her brain which kept her body into a near constant state of restlessness.

Though she lay beside him in bed each night, she imagined he was on his own blanketted island where placid, impersonal waters guarded his private thoughts and dreams from her. The harder she swam towards it, she realized, the further it shrank into the distance.

Frustration was replaced with panic then, as if she were in actual danger of drowning: she'd already paddled too far out, she thought, and didn't have the energy to turn back.