…the words make our silences easier–they’re the current that runs under them.

They have to tell,” he’d saidWell, apparently so.But why? What is it that comes from the telling?Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a...

But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to...

A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

It seems we need someone to know us as we are–with all we have done–and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet...

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy…that makes you unkind.

And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised...

I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could...

But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.

This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The...

And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret....

For it wasn’t the secret–the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway–that led to austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most...

The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.

But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day...