“It was the margaritas.” I reach up to gently disentangle her hand from around my neck. Her arms flop to her side and she looks up at me, her expression earnest.

“It was beautiful. We slept together and it was beautiful again,” Aiko says, though I don’t know if she even believes that. I was too wasted to remember if it was beautiful or not. “I just want to get back to us.”

“And this is your solution?” I shake my head. “Not interested. I don’t want an open relationship. Or one that feels like…”

A prison.

I don’t say it because I don’t want to hurt her, but our life together, that bed when we’re beside each other, feels like a cell. I still care about her deeply, admire her. But I want to be her friend again, not her inmate.

“Remember in counseling when we talked about what we saw growing up?” I ask, taking a different tack. “What we saw in our parents and how it affects us?”

“Yeah,” she says, her eyes resigned because she knows my history—probably knows what I’m going to say.

“We’ve been struggling for a while, but I wanted to make this work for so many reasons. I wanted us to be a family for Noah. I wanted it to work because you’re fantastic, and who wouldn’t want to spend their life with you?” I sit on the edge of the window sill, looking out at our backyard, the garden Noah and I planted, the memories we’ve made here as a family.

“But you know what I’ve come to realize?” I ask, shifting my gaze back to Aiko. “I also tried to make it work because I grew up seeing my parents trying to make it work. Saw this huge gulf between them grow bigger and bigger, and the love that brought them together in the first place wasn’t enough to fill it. They never gave up on the marriage, but somewhere along the way, they gave up on each other.”

I take her hand and look into the familiar dark eyes swimming with bright tears. “I’d rather give up on this relationship than give up on you, Ko, and if we continue down this road, I’m afraid we’ll keep going through the motions but end up resenting each other.”

“You resent me?”

“No, but I think there’s something you need that I’m not giving you and something I need that I’m not getting.”

“Is it that piece of paper?” Her voice is dismissive, her tone bordering on derisive. “You’re such a traditionalist. If we’d gotten married, would you be ‘getting what you needed’?”