“We are confined to the present, but this moment we’re living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions. We are acting within the constraints of an impossibly complex system.”

She did not move, nor did she shift after the door closed behind him. Some notion of washing twitched in her mind, but the effort seemed impossible. Where she was, her lungs continued to fill with air and her heart to beat, and so her situation was apparently endurable.

He looked alarmed, then disgusted. “Who are you?” he said, so differently from how he’d ever said it before. “Who I’ve always been.” He shook his head. “No. You’ve changed.” “Then you’re the one who’s changed me. Blame yourself.”

What can I say to make you believe I know my own mind?”

I’m no expert on the subject, but I think you were right to use the word “snare” in your letter. I know you believe Barclay loves you in his way, but he is also trying to break you. The two things might be the same for him. Nothing that has happened so far can’t be escaped or undone, but if you had a baby I doubt you would find it in yourself to

I miss her, but I also have a strange, vengeful urge to show her, though show her what exactly I couldn’t say. I suppose I want her to feel regret, to suffer as I am, even though I also want to be the one to spare her from all suffering. Does that make any sense?

Marian had written: The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and

My resolve cracked. I glanced in the mirror. They’d already cut my hair down to a severe sort of pixie and bleached it. I was a small pale head atop a huge brown body, puffy and fungus-like. “Don’t worry,” the designer said. “We’ll make it more flattering.” “I don’t care about that,” I lied. “I promise,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard.