liked it more than anyone can like anything and still live
It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she’d first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live.
Context
The love-affair's defining sentence, and the terminal diagnosis inside it: the trembling of anticipation during the cook is the moment she recognized a liking past the survivable limit — more than anyone can like anything and still live. The phrase makes the fatality structural, not accidental; the overdose is not a risk of the love but its logical completion, the only place a liking that large can arrive.