Art exhaled. "Yeah," he said. There was some sense that that wasn't all of it, that he was oversimplifying something very complicated — but on the face of it, if he made things as clear as possible, that was it. He'd gotten in a fight with Desdemona and so he'd left and went on a spiral. And maybe it had gone way further than he'd meant, because if he'd been asked on the night of Easter he would have said that he'd be back a day or two ago.

He brought his hand up to his face to chew on the edge of his thumbnail again. "She doesn't deserve this," he said, again sticking to the simplest thing — Desdemona didn't deserve this because she hadn't signed up for this, she had never agreed to be married to Arthur Pettigrew on a Self-Destructive Spiral, and he didn't think that she would have if she was given the option. And she had always been too good for him, but now — now, he could ruin them both.

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