I finally decided to just have it all out with her, since it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. If I tried to bring it up, she’d shut me down immediately or just start going off on some kind of tangent that had nothing at all to do with what I wanted to talk about. She’d usually give me the excuse that she was just working things out in her head for her next chapter, but I never bought it. Still, I hadn’t been able to get into her head for a long time, and that really bothered me because I remembered the last time we’d stopped talking. I didn’t want to go back to that.

As stupid as it sounds, I was nervous about bringing it up. Shane and my doctor and everyone else I’d spoken to about it had all told me to just let her come to me with it when she was ready, but I didn’t feel like I was going to be able to do that. As hard as I tried, it was slowly eating away at me, and I was starting to hate feeling like I had to walk on eggshells around Alice. I knew she was feeling the same way, and it made us snap at each other a lot and start little arguments that were completely stupid and uncalled for, but we were both at the breaking point and couldn’t seem to find another way to alleviate anything.

As hard as I’d been trying, I just couldn’t keep it inside anymore. We’d gotten to the point where if we were both at home, we were never really in the same room for more than a few minutes at a time. She was acting as if she was almost afraid to be around me, and one night in the kitchen I finally said something.

It was about two weeks after she’d gotten home from Chicago, and we’d planned to have everyone over for pizza in a few hours. I was cleaning the kitchen when she walked in to get some water. She’d been in her office (the one in the house) for most of the day, not making a sound.

“You want me to make you something to eat? It’ll be awhile before everyone gets here and we get the pizza. I can make you a sandwich and bring it in to you,” I offered. I wasn’t expecting her to take me up on it; she hadn’t been eating much lately. But it got her to stop at the door. It had been hard to keep her in the same room with me lately; she’d been going in and out of them as soon as she saw I was occupying space there.