Everything I Never Told You

She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn’t care and went on anyway.

and Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile, the same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

Hannah wraps her arms around herself and squeezes, imagines comforting her mother, her mother’s arms comforting her in return.

What mother doesn’t love to cook with her little girl? Beneath that: And what little girl doesn’t love learning with Mom? Little bumps pocked the page all over, as if it had been out in the rain, and Lydia stroked them like Braille with her fingertip. She did not understand what they were until a tear splashed against the page. When she wiped it aw

thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee.

At these times she slipped her fingertips into her pocket for the barrette, the marble, the button. She turned them over and over until again her mind was smooth.

the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.

Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be pulled into the vacuum she left

“Only if you want to.” She meant it, every time, but she did not realize she was holding her breath.