It's a Love Story

by Annabel Monaghan

On the days I don’t run, worrying is my cardio.

There’s a difference between someone loving you and agreeing with every single thing you do.”

“When you smile at me, I feel like I want to capture it. But it’s not the regular way like when I see something beautiful and I want to photograph it. When you smile, it does something to me, I feel it in my chest, and I just want to figure out how to get you to do it again.”

This feels like wealth, I think. This is the thing you save up for. You live your whole life so that you can be surrounded by too many people in too small of a room and tell the story of how it all happened.

It feels good to want something for someone else, something that has nothing to do with you, just because you care about them. And I wonder if this is what love is. I rest my hand on my heart to feel if it’s changed. I think it has. I have.

‘Love happens over breakfast.’ ” “It’s just something Cormack said when we were first married. Romance happens over dinner. The candlelight, the wine.” “Everyone looks a lot better than they usually do,” Cormack says and laughs. Reenie rolls her eyes. “Well, yes,” she says. “That’s the romance of it. But at breakfast everything’s just as it is, in the light of day. No one wears lipstick to breakfast. And this is where you talk about your day and the part of the roof that might leak this fall. You bring your real self to breakfast.”