Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

It was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another