Sublime

Sadie didn’t know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did.

Pacific?” “Who cares?” the agent said. “You hate

She imagined a backyard for Sam, and a yellow dog of indeterminate lineage from the shelter, and walk-in closets, and laundry done sans quarters and in the privacy of her own home, and no one living above them or below them.

His brain was treacherously negative. He would invent that she had been cold toward him, that she hadn’t even had a class that day, that she had simply wanted to get away from Sam.

He would think Julia was a victim, even though she wasn’t. He wouldn’t know she was wearing a nice dress. He wouldn’t know she’d done her hair and put on lipstick and called Professor Cooper. He might think she hadn’t been a good-enough wife.

She would never admit even to herself that it hadn’t been about the baby at all: it had been some complicated thing about Mia herself, the dark discomfort this woman stirred up that Mrs. Richardson would have much preferred to have kept in its box.

In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked back; and there was a frightened light in her eyes. Could it be that Sue had acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew not what for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of retaliating on him for his secrecy? Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because she was childi

summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls—and

Though her father had never mentioned his schooldays, though she had never heard the story of her parents’ marriage or their move to Middlewood, Lydia felt the ache of it all, deep and piercing as a foghorn. More than anything, her father fretted over her being well liked. Over her fitting in.