Nothing went back to normal. Matt was now Svetlana’s boyfriend. I felt the same shameful emotions I had experienced in the past, when my aunts, mother, and father, in pursuit of various “relationships,” had brought more and more tedious people into our lives. Envy, jealousy, loneliness, despair—and also a kind of guilt, mixed with relief. Insofar as Svetlana and I had been in competition, to see whose worldview was better … that was over.
