“And after that, I begged and pleaded for her to take me back. I was like, ‘This isn’t me, I’ll go to rehab,’ so I went to rehab. But by the time I got out, she’d already made up her mind. She said she loved me but she couldn’t ever be with me. That maybe I was clean now but I’ve got this sleeping monster inside me that could wake up any minute. She couldn’t stay in a relationship where she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“My whole life, I was the doodol tala, the golden son, the nice guy, could do no wrong, always fun at parties. And I was the abusive one. I rang a bell I couldn’t un-ring, and she never forgave me.”

He looked at the bathroom door and let out a deep breath. “So now you know my deep, dark secret.”

The door latch clicked, and the door swung open. Cora sat with her back to the bathroom wall on the opposite side of the doorframe, staring at the sink, and there they sat, yin and yang of the bathroom door.

He moved his hand toward her, walking his fingers toward her like a crab until he was at the end of his reach. She didn’t move.

“What’s causing this?”

She took a deep breath and, as she released it, said, “He did this to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He did this to me. I didn’t have any say in it. This isn’t my fault. I didn’t want this.”

“I know. I got that.”

She hugged herself tighter, clamping her hands to her arms like two vises.

“When . . . did you start noticing these feelings?”

She kept staring ahead, eyes fixed on the porcelain throne in front of her.

“Because Nikola told me that while dynamic fusion bonding does bind party A to party B in a way that we as humans don’t really . . . do, it doesn’t necessarily incite feelings of love any more than being married to someone would. Like it’s nice to love the person you’re married to, but correlation doesn’t mean causation.”

She hugged herself tighter, hanging her head. “I guess the first time I saw him.”

“So before any dynamic fusion bonding.”

“I don’t know, I just remember the first time I saw him having this instinct of like . . . ‘This thing is alone, I have to protect it.’ He called that ‘maladaptive’ but rolled with it, anyway, because it benefited him.”

“And you’d describe that as feelings of love?”

She winced at the word love like it had pinched her. “Not really.”

“When did that start?”