Tessa imagined this is what it must feel like to drown.

To try to swim to the surface, to think you see daylight, only to be dragged under again by the force of crashing waves. 

Her mind felt like a jigsaw puzzle someone had abruptly knocked from a table with a brush of an arm. Here was a red piece. Was it part of the sleeve of a knit sweater or a piece of a heart shattered into bits? And a pink piece. Was it a petal of a silky petunia or a lip turned downward in anguish?

She curled up in a ball on the sofa. A bathing suit she’d bought Ronnie—a bright orange one-piece with a duck on the front and a ruffle around the bottom—was still in a bag on the floor. Tessa felt a strange nostalgia for the person she was before today, the person who bought cute bathing suits for her baby daughter even though she already had three. The person who was so upset when she spilled wine on the sofa cushion that she’d gone to three stores to find the right spray to clean it. The person who felt guilty when she lied to Ken about the grocery store not having the cut of steak he wanted because she didn’t feel like cooking. Before today, those were the types of problems she’d thought worthy of fretting about.

Now she covered her face and wept again. She had no idea what to do. She knew only that she could not talk to anyone about it. It would be easier to make it go away if only the two of them knew about it. She had to keep it contained, nice and neat. To let it out would ensure its growth into something so monstrous it could never be reeled back in. 

She had to fix this. She would get through to Ken. She would make him see that this was not the answer to whatever stress he was feeling, that he was only making it worse. She’d make him see that he was on the edge of a cliff, but she could pull him back.