Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction drawn from lived emotional experience, not a documentary account. Characters may be composites. Names, locations, professions, chronology, dialogue, and identifying circumstances have been altered or invented to serve the story.

Health, substance use, military service, finances, family conflict, and intimate relationships are portrayed through Maya's limited point of view. Her understanding may be incomplete. Her account of disputed experiences should not be read as a clinical, legal, or factual judgment about any real person.

This is a novel. Maya is not a transcript and Darius is not a man with an address; both are made out of the kinds of things that happen, arranged so that they mean something.

What is true in it is the shape. There is a particular arrangement, common enough that every woman who reads this will recognize either herself or her sister in it, in which a capable woman is handed a man's whole life to carry, and is praised for carrying it, and is told that the carrying is love. The people around her are not villains. They are tired, and they are relieved, and they have found someone who is good at it.

I wanted to write it without a monster and without a fool. He loved her. She saw everything. Both of those are load-bearing, and any version that removes either one is a different, easier book.

If you are in it now: the day you leave will be ordinary, and you will not be finished loving him, and that is allowed.

This is a story about learning to trust what love does, not only what it promises.

For readers who recognize their own uncertainty in Maya's, this story offers company, not diagnosis. Love can be real and still not be safe enough to stay.