stories were only real once they were told. All the other stories that weren’t told, or heard, that had no teller, or listener—it was as if the thing had never happened at all. You could pretend it had never happened, or you could refashion events in your head to your own liking until you came to an ending you liked. Once you made the choice to tell a story, it went from being yours to the listener’s, and then there was no way of managing things after that; the story belonged to other people, then.
