You Will Know Me

by Megan Abbott

“Remember that kind of wanting? That kind that’s just for yourself? And you don’t even have to feel guilty about it? You wouldn’t know you should.”

That was more than sixteen years ago, and now, sometimes, they didn’t see each other for days other than in the blue hours of late night and predawn. They knew each other most deeply through body-warmed sheets and the tangle of half dreams. You might think it would doom the marriage, unless you pondered it for one more beat. Consider the prospect that your spouse could forever remain slightly other from you, his body never too familiar, his hands on you almost wholly to seduce you. You were mysterious to him and he was mysterious to you.

That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours anymore but herself.

“I’ve seen things you haven’t.

It came to Katie, that feeling. One she had known before, but it was so much stronger now. A nagging sense of some irrevocable wrong. What have we done to

Katie said, the words from some deep well, and unstoppable: “You come near my daughter again, I’ll break your neck.”

“Whose dream?” “It doesn’t matter whose dream it is,” she said. “Just that it’s a dream.”

“Don’t let me see it hurt. Remember: everything’s beautiful, nothing hurts.” Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Her head turning again, Devon looked up at Katie. Like a foot to the rib cage, it was. Katie nearly lost her breath from the pain and power of it. My girl.

You can’t understand what it’s like until you see your child do something you could never do. No one could ever do. This is what fearlessness looks like, Katie thought. What desire can do.

She hadn’t learned, no one had taught her—Katie and Eric hadn’t taught her—that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they’re not what you thought they’d be. But you’d still do anything to keep them. Because you’d wanted them for so long.

She’d never looked because it felt like she shouldn’t, like staring into the sun.