There had fallen between us what Dogger once referred to as “a companionable silence,” a little parcel of time during which neither of us felt any particular need to talk.

Not everything needs to be said. The silences, the words that aren’t spoken, lead us to the questions we should be asking.

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

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...