Then there were all the ways Trip and Annaliese’s relationship broke down.

For the last year of their political science degree, Annaliese had already taken all the core subjects she needed, so there were a bunch of options she had to take, and Trip didn’t need to be in those classes.  It was a chance for them to grow in different ways.  He took computer science courses while she took art. They still timed their breaks and got Tuesdays and Fridays, but they didn’t see each other during the day as often.

Then there was the time they had to study for the LSATs and Annaliese’s mother hired private tutors to help her study.  Trip wasn’t allowed to be around for that.  

Annaliese passed the exam with more breathing room than anyone expected. Her mother thought it was because the tutors were better at teaching her than Trip.  That wasn’t it at all.  If Annaliese didn’t pass, she couldn’t go to law school with Trip.  She had to pass.  

Trip didn’t pass.  He failed it by a hair’s breadth.

He took the exam, but when it came around, he hadn’t seen his girl for weeks. There had been no Tuesdays and Fridays and he was having a hard time focusing.  Not only that but there was a mean little part of his brain that knew he didn’t have to get into law school.  He didn’t need to pass, only she did and if her mother was paying for tutors then what did it matter if he tutored her or not?  He didn’t even study by himself.

He should have passed.

The fall-out for his not passing was incredible.   His family, not just his father and his uncle, but his brothers and his mother too, were very disappointed.  The discovery he made while he scrambled for another career was jarring.  He didn’t want to do anything else.  If Annaliese was going to be a lawyer, he wanted to be a lawyer with her.

She went to law school and floundered.  Tuesdays and Fridays were a thing of the past and when a day came up where she could slip away to see Trip, he was usually working.  

He was going to take his LSAT again in the spring, but for the time being, he was putting his political science degree to work and had gotten a job working at the Victoria Legislature.  Each time she saw him, her teenage husband with the headphones over his ears was further and further away.

He wore suits.  He got a better job and then another better job.  Soon it was clear that if he stayed working for his MLA, he would have an extraordinarily cushy job he didn’t have to get elected for.  He gave up his studio apartment and bought a condo with incredible views.  

When Annaliese visited him, it was like visiting your date’s home for the first time, and nothing like going home with her husband.  At least, they had decorated their crappy studio apartments together.  The feeling of distance grew as he had more and more of an adult life that had nothing to do with her.  He had friends he met in the evenings when she wasn’t around.  After a while, the whole thing felt very much like having an affair with a married man.  

Actually, she was the one cheating… on the people in her life… cheating everybody.  She was only keeping half of her promises.

The little books had stopped when he no longer sat next to her in class.  Instead, he wrote her a love letter a week.  It was typed instead of handwritten and placed in an envelope that arrived with a bouquet of flowers.  Annaliese’s mother saw nothing inappropriate in this and allowed it.

He had become an ordinary lover instead of the secret, whimsical one he had been.

And the letters changed over time.  ‘I love you.  I need you.  I’m dying without you!’ turned into ‘holidays are coming up and if you’re not free at Christmas to see me then I was thinking I’d go skiing with a few of my friends.  How are your classes going?’

Annaliese started writing him back.  She sent him half-finished letters because she stopped knowing what to say to him and she couldn’t bear to send him nothing.  If the letters and bouquets stopped, she would have nothing.

Her life was terrible.  She hated law school.  She hated a school where Trip wasn’t there.  It was like she had been jolted back to her old high school where the competition was fierce and there was no handsome boy to smile at her and shield her from all the drama that went on if she tried to talk to people.

She woke up and missed waking up in Trip’s arms until she couldn’t quite remember what that felt like.  One day she realized that it had been three months since a Tuesday or a Friday.  Annaliese felt so out of sorts, that she almost called a doctor for a checkup and then she remembered you didn’t need a doctor when you were lovesick.

She wasn’t the only person in the house who wasn’t doing well.  Her mother was sick.  If the old woman knew what she was sick with, she wasn’t telling.  If she didn’t, it came on so stealthily that it snuck up on even her.

The morning that Annaliese heard from her father that her mother had passed away during the night, it was a blow to her.

A blow.