“​He sighed. “I don’t remember it dying. It’s one of those things that just goes—like a storm—when does it stop raining?” Douglas flicked his hands and sniffed, staring back at Mrs. King. “I just realized I didn’t need an umbrella anymore.”

“Just this morning you didn't seem as though you had an aversion to me. You're here in your dying patient's house, eating dinner with his wife, drinking his whiskey and watching his wife play the piano in a dark room," she shook her head and pouted her lips. "You're already in bed with me.”

“The cloth was wrinkled and twisted from the struggle. His forehead was damp, and he lay his forearm across it and stared across the room at the clock. Its pendulum rotated and gathered momentum only to slow and reverse its course. He watched it for a time and slid out of the bed to dress.”

“​Crying on the kitchen floor, she looked up and gasped for breath, raking tears from her pale cheeks. “I need you,” she whispered. “Someone.”

“That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.”

“I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important.”

“I have led you down a road of deception just to correct you and make you look like an uneducated ass”