Atonement

by Ian McEwan

If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

To love her was to be soothed.

At the same time, her mind was—in every sense—where she was to spend the evening, and she had to be at ease with herself.

It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

Wronged child, wronged wife. But she was not as unhappy as she should be. One role had prepared her for the other.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post.

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.