Her theory is that people always fall out of love for the same reasons they fall into it. Everything exciting eventually becomes a nuisance. Recently, on a camping trip, Sebastian forgot to pack pillows and arranged their clothes into lumpy rectangles to cushion their heads. She stayed up all night, glaring at him, his heavy breath always inching toward a snore. But she used to gush over these small acts of innovation after first meeting him. Like when he secured a handle to the middle of her surfboard so she could carry it beneath her arm. Or built a step stool when he noticed she could barely reach the upper cabinets in his house. Now she feels annoyed by how much useless knowledge he seems to carry. That they can’t go anywhere without him regurgitating trivia. At the coffee shop, he boasts to the barista about his expertise in siphon pots. At the dentist, he talks with a full mouth of metal tools about ancient methods of molar removal.

She has watched him begin to resent her, too. He used to be so taken by her curiosity when they went on walks and she kneeled down to inspect a beetle or peeked in through the windows of an abandoned house, enchanted and grinning. But now what he clearly used to see as a charming eagerness to know the world has evolved into words like nosy, invasive, disrespectful. She has watched his fondness distort into resentment and his responses to her stories tighten into sour nods. She has tried to change the things about herself he’s started to hate, to breezily look the other direction when something catches her interest. But while she thought she could harness her questions until they learned to heel, all they do is yank at their chains, bloody and barking in her brain.

“I’m telling you; it doesn’t hurt.” Lena pauses between each word with a forced, patronizing clarity. “I just want to find the wires.”

“Lena.” Mitty collects herself, the fury in her chest only growing louder. “What are you talking about?”

“I know there are wires in there.” She presses her finger into the hole and Mitty winces.

“There are no wires, Lena,” Mitty says. “There’s blood.”

Lena’s attention snaps away from her body to Mitty. Her face is twisted with an adolescent impatience, angry about something she’d already deemed obvious. “Yes, I know,” she hisses. “Of course he would give me blood.”

Her odometer has just tipped above two hundred and fifty thousand miles. How much of that has been spent running, she thinks, hurrying from one place to the next, trying to remain unnoticed? She buys a canned coffee from the mini-mart and fills her tank. At the neighboring pump, a girl is perched in the passenger seat of a raised pickup, sucking on the tip of an e-cigarette. Her feet are bare, resting on the dashboard, toes pressed into the windshield. She can’t be older than twenty, pretty in the way her peers must clamor over, dishwater-blond hair wrestled into a bun with a pretend thoughtlessness, eyebrows drawn dark, cutoff shorts slinking up past her ass. Sometimes, Mitty feels like she never really got to be that age. Lawless and projecting love onto a gaunt boy who fancies himself an adult. Was she lucky, having avoided the pregnancy scares and constant yearning for some invented romance? Or had she missed out on some crucial phase that would have made her more discerning and less afraid of the people who might hurt her? What was lost, she wonders, from being so protected?