The tag on her chamomile teabag said, There is no trouble that a good cup of tea can’t solve. It sounded like what a gentleman on Downton Abbey would say right before his wife got an impacted tooth and elegantly perished in bed.

Eveleth had always hated how blushing felt. It was accompanied by such a miserable desire to cease to be, utterly, to turn into a fog that could be waved away.

When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with – it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.

Instead, for luck, he asked them for 26, because Evvie’s address was 26 Bancroft Street. When he got home and he showed the shirt to Evvie, she said, “Hey, look. That’s my house number. Maybe it’s lucky.” He’d folded it up, saying, “Maybe.

He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t. The sixteenth second was a killer.

The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental.

Who eats pumpkin pie in a bathing suit on a boat in the middle of the ocean?

It’s not a question of whether you could try to do it by yourself. You can always try it. But it can be dangerous, and it’s harder. Trying to buck yourself up is the tooth pliers of mental health.

I have been lying on my couch for thirteen, going on fourteen months. I have barely gone out. I have fed myself and made ends meet. I hope that’s not the proudest of me you could be. I hope surviving not being married to a doctor anymore is not the greatest thing you can imagine for me. I went to school. I’m going to live another fifty years probably. I hope this isn’t the highlight.

You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom.