Larry Birkhead

There were long problems.

But when Anna's mom, when Anna's son Daniel passed away, Anna, you know, I wasn't around at the time, but I remember when Anna would open up about her family and we had those moments where I felt like it was safe for her and she felt like it was safe to talk to me about it.

She would long for her mother.

And she, and I actually tried to play peacemaker and say, hey, why don't you call her?

And she would just start shaking, you know?

And it wasn't, it wasn't, that wasn't on the table.

So I would go as far with it as I could.

Because for me, like I come in from the South and like we, you know, we get, we get togethers, you know, everybody gets together on, you know, holidays, things.

And Anna, I felt like that was a part of her that was missing when I met her, that it was just like, she was kind of on autopilot.

She was collecting.

Like, I felt like I was a part of a collection, you know, like she pulled me into like, you're going to be this and you're going to, you know, like she had a role in her mind that everybody was.

Oh, sure.

Sure.

So, um,

obviously like, you know, as things became intimate and like, you know, like we're, we're, I'm literally in our room every day, basically, you know, and we're literally a couple, but I can't tell anybody, you know, and, and, and, um, you know, and still having the tensions from the outside, you know, outside the room, really, you know, it, um, basically, you know, um, we, we talked about having kids and I thought it was, um,

Well, one of the first nights I was with her, she said to me, I think that you were sent here by my husband as an angel to protect me.

And I don't know if it was the biggest pickup line in the world, you know, or what, but then she was reduced to tears.

And it was a time when like, you know,

you know, I'm pretty modest for like, it was a time when like things could have like heated up in the bedroom, but it was like that stopped that moment because she's crying about her husband.

So I'm like, it was one of those things that I had to deal with.