Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He tapped his cigarette again against the lip of the ashtray, then slowly changed the cross of his legs, his shoulders and head remaining perfectly still. He pondered my statement for such a long time that I wondered if he'd heard me. Then he looked up with gentle eyes and asked, "In that case I presume you love him?"

I nodded.

"Well, then, that's as it should be," he said.

I went to the ward in Lambeth every afternoon and we took a walk together, even if it was raining. The light in that room was a kind of malpractice. I never saw or spoke to the doctor again. It was hard to get information from anyone. Asking questions wasn't the proper form. It was the same way a couple of years later when I gave birth to Michael at St. Thomas's, everyone perfectly pleasant but with nothing but blandishments to offer.

John stayed on the ward for a month. His father visited once, his mother not at all (John was perfect, and she wanted nothing to do with evidence to the contrary). I don't know what he told his roommates or managers, but it wasn't that he'd been in a psychiatric hospital. Often during that month I didn't know which was worse, his dark mood or the shame and frustration it caused him. And he didn't want to talk about the particulars with me.

I decided not to tell my parents. And certainly not my friends, because they would only worry. My sister, Penny, I did confide in, but swore her to secrecy. In an odd way I felt closer to John. I was the only one who visited regularly, and though it was a strain to be making decisions about a wedding when he barely had the energy to read the news—having to wonder what kind of shape he'd be in by then—there was something about those walks in the park, perhaps precisely because he didn't talk a blue streak as he usually did, that added a kind of gravity to being in love with him. I'd always wondered before if the mystery that made the beginning of romance enthralling necessarily had to vanish, or if with the right person it just lasted on. I couldn't have imagined the answer would come in this form, so tied up with trepidation and anger at him for disappearing, in a sense, leaving me with this remnant of himself, but there it was, a mystery deeper than I had guessed at. All his animation and verve could vanish like the weather and stay lost, but then somehow, after six weeks or so, return with such self-forgetting that he didn't see anything strange about how blithely he led me by the arm into a car showroom to look at MGs, and then took me out to lunch and a bottle of wine, as if nothing had ever happened.

In the fifteen years of our marriage, he's never gone back to a hospital or come anywhere close, in fact. He's never had to stop working, or gone nearly so low as he did that fall. He has moods, and occasionally a stretch of a few weeks when I notice his energy flagging, and I don't suppose I'll ever be able to rid myself of the worry I have then, that it will all get much worse. Which is part of what keeps the mystery between us going. You could call that perverse. Fear playing that role. But it's not only fear, and what's hard to explain is that the fear is also a kind of tenderness. I'm the only one who knows in the way I do that he needs someone to watch over him. At the worst moments, when the children are tired and the house is a mess and I see from the pace of his walk up the drive at the end of the day that he's at a lower ebb, it can seem no better than having a fourth child and I want to walk straight out the door and not come back for a month. But most of the time it's not like that. I may not be able to tell what he's thinking, but he reaches for me. And the excitement from the beginning fills me again at those moments. I don't see how it could if I understood him through and through.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.