No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

She told him she’d fallen in love with him with the taste of butter on her lips that first morning, but it was just a story. She had no idea when she’d fallen in love with him. But people needed stories to make sense of things, and she had learned to give them what they needed.

She gritted her teeth. Talk about a thing too much, you’re obsessed. Talk about it too little, you’re hiding something. And no such thing as a middle ground. She could never get it right. That perfect balancing act of the right way to speak, to be, to look, to feel, so your innocence could be confirmed. Once you were tainted you could never get clean.

You lose a dream and it starts to hurt to even remember you ever had it.”

But she was realizing more and more how little she’d known him—or any of them. Her parents, her sisters. She’d been so wrapped up in her own anger and misery, she’d never looked twice at the people closest to her.

The house wasn’t haunted, she was forced to admit. She was.

But no one could ever really know another person, could they? Everyone had secrets.