“Stop trying to pick a fight. Stop trying to push me away. Just stop.” He always fumbled his words at times like these, when she looked at him like he had pink feathers instead of hair or paws instead of hands. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand you sometimes. That’s all.”

“You shouldn’t have married me. I shouldn’t have married you.”

“It would just be . . . so much easier if you didn’t get so uptight about everything.”

“That’s who I am.”

“Or at least you could stop—”

“Go on and say it.”

“Getting so down. Being so sad sometimes. It would be so much easier. For both of us. Things aren’t that bad. You don’t have to be that way.”

“It’s not a goddamn choice, Jack.”

Then Mia vanished and he finally understood. He suddenly had a vacancy inside his chest that couldn’t be filled, not by booze or work or companionship. It was more than emptiness. It was as if emptiness had its own gravity. There was a black hole at the core of him that sucked everything in so that his muscles felt bruised and his bones in danger of cracking as his body slowly collapsed in on itself.

Five years ago, he felt so separate from his wife in their marriage—but now that they’re officially apart, he feels like they might be the same after all. He’s never seen a therapist, but he can diagnose himself just fine. He’s clearly got what she always had: a big old dump truck spilling over with depression. At his cruelest, he wants to blame Nora for infecting him. At his most generous, he wishes he had shown her more compassion. In the time before, his emotional range had been limited to happy, sad, or angry, and now he realizes there’s a whole range and depth of notes he never knew before. And the emotional and physical are very much entwined in a way he had never experienced. Symbiotic.