“Again, you make it sound as if it’s you versus me. Versus us. Because all this time you were lusting after Kristin I had no idea of what you were thinking. If it weren’t for Caitlin bloody James, I might never have known.”

“Would that have been so bad? Honestly, Jane, you are the kind of overly sensitive person who would be better off not knowing things like this.” Annie knew she’d gone too far as soon as the words had left her mouth. Jane was—quite literally—too sensitive to have her sensitivity criticized. “I’m sorry. I take that back. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s fine. I know I’m hopeless when it comes to dealing with certain things.” Jane’s voice trembled with desperation.

Annie put a hand on her wife’s knee—the first physical contact since they’d sat down.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“You are not hopeless, babe. I wasn’t being very tactful,” Annie said. Her hand on Jane’s knee soothed a little. Again, Jane wondered whether she would have preferred not knowing. Or whether the fact that she did know—that she was given no choice in the matter—had been a necessary evil to deal with some other things that were going on between them. Or even to simply stop and undergo a “relationship health check.”

Jane had used that term once in one of her books and, as always, Annie had been the first to read it. Thankfully, Annie had long ago grown out of the habit of questioning whether anything Jane wrote was mined from their life together, but after she had read that particular phrase, she had asked Jane if she believed they needed a so-called relationship health check.

All Jane had to do was give her wife a look—one corner of her mouth titled down, one eyebrow raised—to let her know no such thing was necessary. Most of the time, it was impossible for Jane to distinguish between what was truly made up and what had bubbled up from the depths of her subconscious mind. Nothing was ever fully made-up, just as nothing was ever literally drawn from her life. But the fact of the matter was that, now that she wasn’t writing and she didn’t have the outlet for her emotions, she needed to find another way to process the events of the past few weeks. If writing was off the table, talking was the only option left. First of all, she had to stop blaming Annie for pointing out the obvious about some fundamentals about Jane’s personality.

“Even though, objectively speaking, me kissing Beth was much worse than you having your crush on Kristin, it seems to me you were just much better equipped at dealing with it. I think I may need some pointers.”