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?

They had shared it long past when all the other couples they knew had stopped sharing anything other than credit-card debt and casual, or focused, resentment.

Every conversation, she dropped in a half dozen tiny bombs. You only realized after, when the ticking grew louder.

The pause that followed felt very important. It was one of those moments in a marriage when you have to make a critical decision with alarming speed and the consequences could last a long time, even forever.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you’re left in it.

if courage is just another word for desperation.

“Because, Katie, there’s nothing on God’s green earth I wouldn’t do for my child,” Gwen said, the bastioned fortress in the center of an impassable moat. “That is something Eric and I agree on. Don’t you? What kind of mother wouldn’t?” What kind of mother. To say that to Katie, who had given every waking hour and every sleeping hour to her daughter.

There were so many things she and Eric had tried to buffer Devon from, the shocks and trauma of the world. Anything that might distract her, hurt her.

And the minute she’d forced her way out, kicking spastically at all corners, been sucked out by the grappling hands of that handsome boy, she hadn’t known what to do, how to live in this world. Everything had been too much.

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.