So Late in the Day: Stories of Men and Women

by Claire Keegan

so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.

‘I just didn’t think it would be like this, is all,’ he said. ‘I just thought about your being here and having dinner, waking up with you. Maybe it’s just too much reality.’

Then a line from something he’d read somewhere came to him, to do with endings: about how, if things have not ended badly, that they have not ended.