Anytime at all, she could fill her red roller bag with her miniature clothes and run off. She’d done that with me several times. Each time was quietly revelatory: her escape expressed distance, but also measured that distance. As though our relationship had developed in such a way that Barbara had the right to be seen leaving, to be grieved for.

When she did this, I’d pour myself a drink—tonight, a whiskey soda—and lie down on the bed. Two drinks later, I picked up my phone and started writing her loving texts. I thought it was fine for her to leave, though I insisted she tell me which of her friends she was staying with. All of a sudden I missed her voice, and called, but she didn’t answer.

I texted her that I had no problem with her staying overnight someplace else, it was fine.

She responded: “If you have no problem with me leaving, then why are we even together?”

“I like this about you—I like how you run away from home.”

There was something, I wrote, that made me still have hope for our ridiculous relationship.

She wrote that my texts cheered her up.

It was almost two in the morning, we’d been texting for hours and from my bed, through the window and wisteria leaves, beyond the grate and past the low wall, I saw the front of two cars parked herringbone-style on the empty, dead-end road. I geared up to get out of bed, shut the glass door, brush my teeth, or maybe eat something.

Now Barbara was more present than ever, and I was like a scientist grappling with antimatter, reflecting on that sense of absence and tenderness, that momentary clear-cut distance.

It was early morning when we began our long car ride from a resort on the Dead Sea to Aqaba. First, we drove the winding roads into Jordan’s interior, up to sea level and higher, above the pool of blue-gray haze where the salt lake hid. On the opposite shore, far off, was Israel, like a mirage, droves of men on horseback raising dust. Stepping outside the church of the Jerusalem mosaic, it was over a hundred degrees at noon, and we wandered a town’s one-way streets, in search of bottled water and juice.

The King’s Highway is famous for that section of canyon where people stop to take pictures of the carved sand formations along the curling road. Barbara managed to get a few good shots of me: I was sitting, hunched over, though she thought I looked glamorous, face in three-quarter view, hand propped nicely on my leg—a real, honest-to-god portrait. She hadn’t taken my photo in a long time.

Looking through those pictures, I said something stupid, something languid and disrespectful: “So, are you starting to love me a little?”