“Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think,” Phoebe says. “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It’s your job to take care of yourself like that.”

So she read the novels about slow, incremental improvement, about sisters who were also good friends, women who were too witty for the sincerity of their landscapes, women who were above marriage and its conventions and, yet, got to be beautiful and experience the joys of it anyway. She devoted her career to these books because she needed them. She

Phoebe learned trying to explain her feelings to her husband that you can’t explain this kind of darkness to someone who has never felt it.

That is why she has always preferred books—because to be alive is much harder. To be alive, she must leave this hotel, despite the uncertainty of everything.

Phoebe hates having to perform happiness in front of other people’s children.

Phoebe had started to hate standing in front of her students each day, all of them waiting in silence for her to prove herself. Because hadn’t she proved herself yesterday? And the day before? Why did she have to wake up every day just to prove herself if it didn’t seem to matter how often she proved herself? By the end of the hour, she was

Sometimes, she read books instead of living a life, but didn’t that just mean that her life was about reading books? And couldn’t that be a life the way his life was all about floating on a river? Every night, she watched her father put on gear and wordlessly get in the boat and try to hook the same fish he’d fished for years and he never thought

Phoebe had been raised to feel sorry for everything—sorry for being born, sorry for almost drowning, sorry for getting an A-minus on my exam, sorry for not bearing children, sorry for not getting to the last three slides of the PowerPoint, everybody. Sometimes, Phoebe sent her class apology emails after lectures when she didn’t finish on time.

It is good practice, speaking with finality. Being direct. Saying the hard truths in front of the wedding people. Phoebe wants to get better at that. Phoebe will get better at that. Phoebe knows this is the only way she wants to live. She must say the terrible thing, even when it’s hard. She must think the terrible thing, even when it’s scary.