The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

Is it what we dreamed of in high school, when studying twice as hard as the boys? Was clerical work what we had in mind when opening the fat manila envelopes containing our college acceptance letters?

Moscow radiates out in circles, like a pebble dropped into still water. The city expands from its red center to its boulevards and monuments to apartment buildings—each one taller and wider than the next. Then come the trees, then the countryside, then snow, then snow.

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.” I shut the book. I didn’t want to think of her. I couldn’t.

And he believed I’d follow him—that I’d take the pills, that I didn’t have the strength to go on alone. At one time, I might not have. In fact, I might have been the one to first suggest it. But not now. Now I could go on. I would go on.