“Stop trying to fix it. Just let it exist for awhile,” Shane finally told me. “That’s all you can do. If you keep trying so hard you’ll drive her away.”

She was right, but then again she generally is. I knew it even as she said it. There was really nothing that could be done for it except to give it time. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to do, though.

The next couple of months were tough. I tried really hard not to press Alice to talk to me, even when I knew she was clamming up on me about things. I just listened to her when she did feel like talking, because every now and then, she did. It was usually about little things, and she very rarely spoke of her new book, but it didn’t really matter much. I just wanted her to talk to me.

I’d been seeing my therapist a lot too, and he suggested that I take some time away, that it would do us both some good as Alice tried to get used to the thoughts she was having and the fact that they were just lingering fears and not reality. His advice seemed a bit backward to me, but I decided to follow it when a tennis tournament in Seattle came up. Although my contract for commentating with ESPN only covered summer tennis tournaments and not benefits, I was asked to do it anyway.

Alice encouraged me to go, and although I could see the worry in her eyes when I left, she seemed as if she’d be okay. I could never really tell from day to day anymore, and had almost negged on commentating simply because I didn’t want to leave her, even if it was only for a weekend. But she said that she had so much going on in her head that she’d like a few days to herself.

All of them offered to go with me, but I turned them down. I felt like I needed to do it on my own. It turned out to be a good thing; Alice called me the first night, when I was tossing and turning in the hotel bed trying to get comfortable and failing miserably. She let me know that she had sent her manuscript off, and that she finally felt like she could relax a little because she didn’t have to constantly think about it anymore.