Sonya and I talked through things. She didn’t know how she got out of the shackles and the closet, but I admitted that I thought that I may have not actually locked them. She had no idea why she didn’t just go right at me when she got out, but how the hell were you going to try and attach reason to the madness that was her condition?

Our relationship went on, but it was never the same. It was like one of those colossal fights, or little pieces of information that is a sharp knife to a relationship, but not a kill shot. It’s almost worse than a blow up, because it didn’t submarine the relationship, but instead poked enough holes in it to where it would never be the same and it would eventually sink.

I internally delayed plans to move in with Sonya full-time. I stepped our relationship back a little bit. Took some nights off, even poked around on Tinder to see the lay of the land. I created a little bit of a distance. I was pretty sure Sonya noticed.

We drifted. It happens. Like everyone in the modern dating scene, we let things linger for as long as humanly possible, even though we knew it was bound to fail and it was going to create more problems.

I still spent weekends at Sonya’s. My visits felt a little hollow, but I still hit the freeway every Friday afternoon and slogged through traffic until I was in her cul-de-sac and ready for an awkward weekend.

We were about two months into this when things got strange. I got off work a little early and made it to Sonya’s house a little over an hour before I usually got there. She wasn’t there.

Sonya worked from home and knew I was coming so her absence was fairly strange. I had texted her a couple hours before that I was going to be early, so she knew I was coming.

I waited for her for nearly 30 minutes on the front steps of her house. She showed up hot and bothered and excused her tardiness from getting stuck at the store buying wild shrimp instead of the farmed shrimp at Ralph’s or something. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. I just wanted to move on and get the night over with.