“What a fool he was, how short-sighted, how little-lived he’d been not to feel her fear as she felt it. For her it was an informed terror, re-entering a haunted house, replaying an old and frequent death. She kissed him; Sorry about your stupidity. She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.”