[...] She knows that it’s perfectly possible that while she’s asleep he’s maybe writing the sentences that will sunder them. Just when the bill for everything is due, just before their wishes become reality, everything is once more up for grabs, teetering at the top and maybe about to collapse, she knows that. Yesterday, he fell asleep with her, two spoons on the narrow bed, and she thought she had never been happier in her life. But sometimes he clings on to her too hard. Sometimes he says: I feel tense — and that means she has to take her clothes off. And other times it’s so perfect she could die. What does she want from him? She laughed herself silly the other day when he put forward their alphabet soup, Noodle ABC, for the State Literary Prize. And in the shower, the way he rubs away at his eyes with the washcloth like a little boy. Does she love him because he’s really a child, despite being ostensibly thirty-four years older? He thought he was addicted to her, he wrote not long ago, and she thought, no, she’s addicted to making him addicted. Is whatever she is and has enough to keep him? And what is she exactly?