For the past 13 years, a few days each week, I practiced social distancing by living 200 miles from my husband, Michael — not because I didn’t love him, but because I loved him so much. My fear: If I were to leave my old life behind to be with Michael, losing him would mean losing everything.

For our entire marriage, he and I have lived as if we each had one foot on home base, hesitant to run toward each other, scared to be tagged out. I had lost my base too many times to give this one up.

Decades ago, when I was at college in Oregon, my parents divorced and suddenly there was no home back east to return to. In my 20s, I spent years constructing what seemed to be a secure nest with a boyfriend, until the day he abruptly walked out. At 36, I married a lanky Dutch art historian named Willem, and we settled into life in New York. We adopted a child from Lithuania, a boy, and I was overjoyed that I had lassoed a little family. But four years later Willem died from brain cancer, leaving me to raise our son alone.

Nearly a decade passed before I met Michael, a recent widower who lived in Baltimore. From the day we married, when he was 57 and I was 54, with our three sons at our side, I have been frightened of becoming a widow again.

In this marriage, each time I had a wonderful time with his group of life-embracing journalists and their long-married spouses in Baltimore, I would scurry back to my New York life of teaching and writing and long walks with my women friends. And to my Upper West Side apartment, the one aspect of my life that has been reliable for almost 40 years.

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When the pandemic hit, Michael drove those 200 miles into the epicenter to pick me up and bring me to Baltimore, where we have had the privilege of being together, sheltering in place, ever since.

Whenever I have asked Michael, who is now almost 70, if he’s scared that I may die and make him a widower again, he shrugs. But he also clings to his home and city, which is full of his life’s touchstones. Here is where the bus pulled up in 1970 with the first class of women to attend his college, where he fell in love with his future wife as she walked down the steps. Not far away is the home they shared together with the sprawling maple where he built a tree house for their boys.

Although some of our friends joke that living in separate cites is perhaps the key to a successful marriage, others say, “Aren’t you scared the marriage will fall apart? That one of you will have an affair?” The fact is, we have been having affairs. Not with other people, but with our respective homes and hometowns.

My building in New York is where the superintendent greeted Willem and me the day we brought our son home, speaking to him in Polish, one of the languages our baby had already heard during his first seven months of life.

My apartment is where my son made meticulous toy car traffic jams from his bedroom to ours where his father lay with 18 staples in his head after the brain cancer operation. When Willem died, the superintendent had to help the funeral home fit his body into the elevator while my son held up his toy tractor and said, “You have to tip him up.”

My apartment is a totem pole of my life, where I tied the shower curtain into a knot so my son and I could use it as a punching bag in the weeks after our loss. It is where I brought the man who would become my second husband home and my then 11-year-old son asked, “What bed are you going to sleep in?”

New York City is the place where at 7 a.m. I used to take my young son to the horse stable near Central Park. Heading to our next stop, my son would run ahead of me down to the Hudson, the houseboats at the 79th Street Boat Basin. One was home to a little girl in my son’s kindergarten class; we let the children run wild on the docks, screaming with the sea gulls.

Since the pandemic rearranged the world, the three sons Michael and I share have remained where they live, scattered across the country, and my 94-year-old mother sits with an addled mind on the third floor of her memory care facility, near our home in Baltimore, where for the past three years I have been visiting every weekend, rubbing her back, taking her for walks in the garden.

Recently she was moved to hospice care, and I stand in the driveway, unable to get closer, as if I’m on a far-off shore. I hold up a hand-drawn sign with a tilted heart, thanking the aides who remain sunny as they wheel her out to the balcony. I shout up to my mother, telling her who I am. She waves and blows kisses, whether to the clouds or to me, I do not know.

One day another woman walked out of the building in her mask, her head bent like a sparrow.

“How are you?” I said, forcing myself not to walk toward her.

“My husband passed last week,” she said.

I gasped, holding out my arms in an empty embrace.

“He took care of me,” she said. “I took care of him. Thirty-eight years.”

In one of my writing workshops I have a student who came to the United States on a ship after spending World War II hiding for months in a coal bin in Budapest. Now confined to Zoom, I stare at her brave face in New York as she reads what she wrote about the two times she has been confined, this second time alone in her apartment on the phone with Apple support in Minnesota instead of in a coal bin listening to Winston Churchill from his bunker in London on the scratchy radio.

Not long ago the hospice rabbi called while I was taking a bath. Michael answered my cellphone, thinking it might be the call we knew was coming. He handed me the phone, as I tried not to splash and said a silent prayer this would not be the final call.

He was just checking in to see how I was doing and to explain that new regulations meant he could not visit my mother as he had been doing regularly. As I sat naked in the tub, I said I was doing fine, and then I told him of my student who hid in the coal bin and how she inspires me. When I hung up, I wept.

When Michael and I met, we were full of passion and abandon, driving and taking the train back and forth between our two cities urgently. One night when he’d driven up, it was taking him so long to find a parking space that I brought him dinner and a glass of wine to the car. We tumbled toward each other, even as each week we spun apart. The fact that his late wife’s wedding dress still hung in their closet and my late husband’s New York City Marathon jersey hung in my son’s closet was fine with both of us.

Now we are almost two decades older than our first beloveds were when they died. I confess, before the pandemic there were times that I would wince upon seeing the photos of his first wedding with his bride looking so youthful and dewy. More than once I had one of my spells, as my tolerant Southern husband calls them, which is a euphemism for a screaming fit of jealousy.

Today each of our three sons texted us, relieved we were sheltering together in place. For now, we dance in our Baltimore kitchen to “Fly Me to the Moon.” Springtime has burst with an almost indecent beauty outside, with the songs of mourning doves and wrens. On the news, I hear the banging pots and howls echoing from buildings at 7 p.m. in New York, and I wish I was there even as I am relieved that I am not.

This pandemic has a strange way of pushing some people closer while pulling others apart. My mother waves from the balcony. I offer a grieving woman a hug from 10 feet away. Our sons text us their love from afar. And Michael and I — finally sharing one home base, for however long — turn up the volume on “Fly Me to the Moon” and dance.

Patty Dann’s new novel, “The Wright Sister,” will be published in August.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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