For Leo, the pressure manifested not as my swirling paranoia, but as a deep, silent exhaustion that seemed to seep from his very bones. I could chart its progress in the slope of his shoulders when he walked through the door each evening, as if an invisible weight were steadily pressing down.
He was trying, with a palpable and heartbreaking diligence, to live up to an unspoken, shifting standard-the standard of the man he had been for one night. And he was failing, and he knew it.
I had unknowingly unleashed a version of himself—a wilder, more liberated, hungrier avatar-and now he felt contractually obligated to perform it for me, like an actor condemned to reprise a starring role long after the script had been lost and the stage had become our ordinary life.
His attempts were pai
