No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

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 likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until she is a tiny speck drifting.

But now she was home, and that old Emma had been waiting for her here the whole time. A ghost in this house.

Worry when it looks perfect, because that means you’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.

“I’ve barely got the energy for my own grudges.

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.”

The older she got, the less she thought she knew anyone at all.

“One of the hardest things Vic and I did was figure out how to fight without hurting each other.”

“We’ll get through it,” Emma said. “It’s not going to be okay. It’s already not okay. But we’re going to survive it.”