“You didn’t have fun with me?” Ruby said dryly.

“Er, no. That’s not what I mean. I mean nothing serious, no connection, no crying in bed when you leave. But it doesn’t work like that. I found myself thinking about you in a way that made me sad. I thought about how we couldn’t last. I thought doing the montage would be some kind of fun blip, but I started to think about life without you as something less than what it was with you in it.”

“That’s how I was feeling too. Except when I started feeling that way it made me want to be closer to you, to share things with you, not to pull away.” She sounded angry, which was fair.

“I know. You’re definitely smarter than I am. I thought if I didn’t do the things that you want to do when you feel close to someone, like tell them about your actual shitty life problems, then I could somehow keep the desire to be close away.”

Ruby closed her eyes and looked like she was trying not to shake me because of how stupid I was.

“The thing is that relationships don’t last forever,” I said. “Love doesn’t last forever. I’ve known that for a long time now.”

“This is taking a bleak turn,” Ruby remarked.

“I’m gonna pull it all together, I promise,” I said. “See, I think love isn’t this fixed thing that can beat all the odds. It fades or changes and it can twist into something else. So, I’ve believed for a while now that there was no point in being in love. Not if it’s all going to go away and leave you kind of broken. I thought it wasn’t worth my time. Especially if for me, time might be shorter than everyone else’s.”

“What do you mean? Why would it be shorter?”

I looked up at the sky, to give myself a second to gather my courage. It still felt unnatural to talk about these things with someone else. I thought about backtracking. Of saying something to get me out of this. But I knew that if I wanted to have something real, I had to say the thing I never wanted anyone to know. Maybe I was wrong to think that it had contributed to Hannah falling out of love with me. Maybe I was right and the pressure of everything ground us down in some way. But either way it was part of my life now and I had to tell Ruby the truth. The whole truth.

“The dementia. It could happen to me too. There’s a good chance that it will.”

Ruby’s face changed from impassive to stricken, for just a second. Then she composed herself.

“Saoirse, that’s . . . I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK. And you don’t have to pretend that you’re not freaked out.”