“There needed to be a distance. The one thing the past few weeks had driven into me over and over was the more you got to know someome, the more you inevitably came to care about him or her. The lines between you became blurred, and when the separation came, it was excruciating to untangle yourself from that life. Even if I had wanted to tell them, there was no way to put that kind of pain into words. No way to make them understand.”
