Husbands & Lovers

by Beatriz Williams

A sense of sacrament. Her love for him, her absolute confidence in that love, where had it come from? It was faith, that’s all. Visceral, stupid. The instinct that you shared some essential element of your composition with this person, whom you had only just met, spent only a few hours in conversation. Yet there it was.

“If you need me to swing by with a pair of shovels and a bottle of bleach,” I tell her, “just say the word.”

“It’s important to know where you came from,” she says. “It’s a part of you. But it doesn’t have to define you. They give you the paper and ink, but you write the story yourself.”