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Her eyes burned. Her throat tightened. She fought not to start crying again.

She was supposed to do better. She shouldn’t let him do this.

Her plan had been to stay strong so she wouldn’t fall apart when Jude was gone.

But the truth finally settled on her like a weight.

It was too late.

It was already far too late to save herself from heartbreak.

Because despite all the reasons she had to protect herself, she couldn’t keep any sort of emotional distance from Jude.

He didn’t want their relationship to be one-sided or unbalanced. He wanted to give as much as take. And there was no sense in pretending it could be any different.

She couldn’t be his wife in a vacuum. He wanted to be her husband too.

10

Eve was in a foul mood.

Jude had never known her to be bad-tempered before, so her current mood was strange and unsettling. She was sometimes withdrawn and occasionally impatient, but she’d never been grumpy with him. Until now.

It troubled him.

Shortly into their flight over the Atlantic, he’d gotten a headache, and Eve had insisted he take one of his pills. He’d resisted at first. He’d made it more than four days without even a small headache, and its recurrence now was upsetting. Plus it was starting to feel like he was losing too much of his remaining time being groggy and confused from medication. He’d been looking forward to this trip, and he didn’t want to miss out on whatever time with Eve he had remaining.

But she’d snapped at him to not act like a child. Despite her tone, she had a point. It was irrational and immature to rebel against reality like a toddler stamping their foot. He had a tumor in his brain, and it was going to kill him. In the meantime, it would make him miserable if he didn’t take the medication he had available.

So he’d relented and swallowed the pill. Then spent the rest of the flight and most of the connecting flight to Cairo sleeping it off.

At least his headache was better as they approached their destination. Not completely gone, but significantly improved. And soon the fog in his brain from the pill would clear.

But Eve’s mood was even worse.

He tried to take her hand as they moved through the airport. He’d gotten into the habit of that whenever they were in a crowd, and she’d always appeared to appreciate it. But today she pulled her hand away after less than a minute. He didn’t try again, but he stayed close to her, making sure she didn’t get swept away by the momentum of the crowd. Whenever the distance between them increased, he put a hand on her back to keep her beside him, but as soon as the crowd thinned, she’d discreetly step away from him, requiring him to drop his hand.

Then, in the car they’d hired to take them to the hotel in Giza, she sat staring down at her phone the whole time.

Eve never did that. She was one of the least phone-obsessed people he knew. He might have been worried she was communicating with someone she liked better than him, but she wasn’t writing messages. She didn’t even seem to be reading. Just staring.

But her focus on her phone was obviously intended to shut him out.

Jude was a perpetual overthinker. He’d always been that way, and it was one of the characteristics that made him a good writer. Right now, however, his overthinking trapped him in a cycle of mentally reviewing every single interaction he’d had with Eve in the past week, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong and why she might be unhappy with him.

The weekend had been so good. Difficult in some ways since he’d had to tell the truth to his father, but even that had been needed. Relieving.

He’d felt so close to Eve. On Monday he’d been slightly concerned since she’d been avoiding spending time with him, but he’d convinced himself he’d imagined the distance. After her accident that night, she’d been close to him again—clingy and emotional.

He’d made her feel better that night the way she’d done for him so many times, and being able to do so was immensely gratifying.

Yesterday they’d stayed home all day. She’d needed to recover, and he’d wanted to be with her. They’d rested and chatted and watched movies and taken a nap together. She’d offered to give him a blow job before bed, but he’d refused since she wasn’t really in the mood and would have only been doing it for him.

He hadn’t minded not having sex last night. She’d never even considered sex when he was unwell. Of course he wouldn’t expect it when she was the one to feel bad. He’d felt close to her yesterday anyway—with or without sex.

But this morning she’d woken up in a bad mood, and it wasn’t improving.

So over and over again in his mind, he reviewed every moment he’d spent with Eve in the past few days, searching for the answer to the riddle of her current mood.

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