The Guest

by Emma Cline

People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.

What was more annoying than one of something, a reminder that the world was unreliable, that even valuable things went missing?

That’s what they all wanted, wasn’t it? To see, in the face of another, pure acceptance. Simple, really, but still rare enough that people didn’t get it from their families, didn’t get it from their partners, had to seek it out from someone like Alex.

But even as she said this, she could hear that she didn’t sound very convincing. That some part of her was still allowing space for someone else to solve her problem.

And she did love him, in a way—he had solved everything.

But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.