“I know,” I said. She’d told me the story before. (“I don’t only love you,” she’d said often. “I also like you.”) “And he named a computer after me?” “He pretended he hadn’t, afterward.” And then she told me the story—again—of how they’d named me together in the field, how he vetoed all her choices until she thought of Lisa. “He loves you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know he loves you.” This was hard to grasp. “If he saw you, really saw you and understood what he was missing, how he wasn’t showing up for you, it would kill him. He’d be like this.”
