He pulled in a deep suck of a breath. ‘I believe you. But you’d always told me that I should leave if you relapsed.’

‘But I hadn’t relapsed. That’s not the word—’

Ignoring me, he continued speaking. ‘For the longest time I couldn’t imagine it—you were so committed to staying clean. Then it happened and it was a fucking nightmare. How often did I beg you to quit? And you just lied.’ His face spasmed. ‘All your girls—Claire, Anna, Nola, Brigit and Olga Mae, I rang them so often, they stopped taking my calls. I kept doing sweeps of the apartment and finding more stashes of the pills. I was wondering about cancelling your cards—’

I’d have found the money somewhere.

‘—but forcing you to stop wouldn’t have gotten you clean. You had to be the one who decided. It took me nearly six months to face it, you didn’t love me enough—’

‘Of course I loved you!’

‘You loved the pills more. That’s a fact, Rachel. I couldn’t cure you. Just by being there, I was allowing it. If nothing in an addict’s life changes, they won’t change—how often had I heard you say that? If I left, I hoped it might shock you into getting clean.’

‘Wait, now—’ This was so confusing.

‘But I couldn’t move just eight blocks uptown. I wouldn’t be able to stay away from you.’

‘You really wanted to get far, far away from me.’

‘I didn’t want to leave you at all. But, you know, Rachel, I wasn’t exactly sane around then.’

He looked so distraught that suddenly that was easy to believe.

‘In the years since, it’s obvious I overreacted…But at the time it seemed like the only choice left to me. I’d run out of road.’

For the first time I had a sense of how he might have felt.

‘To do it right, you had to be out of reach. And I was terrified, Rachel. My life was in Brooklyn with you. At the best of times, I hate change. I picked Denver because I knew two people there—two more than any other place. I had to start a new job, find a place to live and get up every morning and go through the motions like a dead man walking. No one wanted to hang out with me, not even Johnno and Elaine after a while, I must have been too…depressed, whatever the word is. I couldn’t connect with other people, their lives seemed so stupidly light-hearted…’ He looked at me, a shiny-eyed glare. ‘That morning I left, I’ll never forget it, the way you pleaded, it tore me to shreds. I nearly gave in.’ He clapped a hand over his mouth. ‘I didn’t want to go, but I felt I had to.’ The words were muffled. ‘Because—’