You might have thought I’d worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn’t. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, “You wouldn’t have liked me then.

He’d taught her something tonight. Taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with. She felt small, and foolish, exposed.

Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard – the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.

She guarded herself against it, she supposed, the way she guarded herself against everything difficult or painful – by being loving, by being solicitous.

I dreamed of my grandparents living there as though they always had with their habits, their rituals, their ways of speaking. With the illusory sense I had as a girl, when my own world was so fragile, that they always would be there. That they would always welcome me and care for me. That they were a place I could always go. A homeland.

We didn’t know what would happen next: that was our great gift. The gift of youth. The thing we miss, it seems to me, no matter what we’ve made of our lives, as we get older. When we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last.

Love isn’t just what two people have together, it’s what two people make together, so of course, it’s never the same.

There were disappointments. Things you couldn’t know you had wanted, or even things you were quite certain you hadn’t wanted, but still, as you discovered, missed some aspect of.

Sam felt more and more that there was no room for him to be who he really was with Claire.

My sister and I were the ones in the family who had seen this as necessary; neither of my brothers felt there was a problem with Dad. And in general when I’d expressed my concern for him, she was the one of my siblings who responded. She and I had also been the ones who sorted through and distributed mother’s possessions after she had died.