Someone Else's Shoes

by Jojo Moyes

I just haven’t had any time.” She never has any time. She says it like a mantra, along with “I’m so tired.” But nobody has any time. Everybody is tired.

There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.

She does not try anyone else. Nisha is not big on female friends. School had left her with a deep distrust of the subtly volatile dynamics that form when girls get together.

“How many of the decisions you make each day are because you actually want to do something, and how many are to avoid the consequences of not doing it?”

Sometimes Sam feels she has been so conditioned to be useful every minute of every day that there is almost nothing she does in which she is not simultaneously keeping a subconscious tally.

Do men hear this constant inner voice, telling them constantly to strive to be better, to be productive, to be useful?

“Want to talk about it?” “Not really.” If she says a word about it right now she will cry. And not even normal tears: she feels as if she is permanently on the verge of huge, terrifying sobs that will engulf her and leave her red-nosed, snotty and heaving.

It’s as if there is not much she could do that would change this woman’s feeling that she, Nisha, is fundamentally okay.

“Jesus. Why are adults so complicated? You’d think you’d have sorted it all out by the time you were in your forties.”

Strength—real strength—is not doing what someone asks you, necessarily. Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love. Strength is being in that terrible room hour after hour even though every cell in your body is telling you it’s too much for you to cope with.”

She stops staring at her face in the magnifying mirror—honestly, they should be banned to all women over the age of thirty—and