The following weeks were the most singular of my life. I woke up with Annabelle in the morning and fell asleep curled up around her at night. It was the safest I had felt since I was a child, before my family fell apart. I tried not to dwell on a month passing so swiftly, assuring myself that we would start to get sick of each other before the three months were up. Right.

It was Annabelle who convinced me to let in the light. She drew open all the drapes in my house, letting the warm March sunshine in. I don’t think I imagined the lift in the spirits of Jackson, Lupita, and Juan at this abrupt change. Either the light made them happy, or possibly, the haze of happy I was looking at them through made them seem happier, or perhaps it was a bit of both.

Annabelle was like having an exotic being from another dimension around. She saw things I missed like the way a hawk rode the thermals over the construction site for Lexi’s development or how the leaves in the trees turned upside down before a rain.

She sat completely still on a chair in the backyard for hours, watching the birds interact, and then she made up voices and conversations for them. My favorite was a big black cowbird that she called “the Masshole,” a mash-up of Massachusetts and asshole, and she voiced him with a thick Boston accent, saying things like, “The grub heah’s a wicked pissa.”

I’m not sure at what point I became one hundred percent smitten with her. It might have been when she voiced the birds, or maybe it was the night after I’d made love to her, twice, that she announced she needed pancakes right then and there or she was going to perish. I’d obviously lost brain cells during the orgasm portion of the evening, proving once again her theory that orgasms made you stupid, because instead of refusing I said, “Okay.”

I never left my house at night. Hell, for the previous nine months I had practically never left my house at all. This was madness.

But Annabelle didn’t live within the tight boundaries of my very narrow comfort zone. She was new to Phoenix, and she wanted to do all the things and experience every nook and cranny of life in the Southwest.

Over the past few weeks, she’d dragged me and Jackson to the Phoenix Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the Desert Botanical Gardens, and we’d even toured Tovrea Castle. When I say toured, what I mean is I found a quiet place to sit while they walked through the various places. If Annabelle resented that I didn’t participate fully, she never said so. I was doing my best to meet her halfway but I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed it.