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When Lou was a girl, her breasts grew both calamitously early and big. Boys came at her, shouting to one another. Alone or together, running, they competed to touch a breast, capture the flag. Had those boys put her off males forever? Throughout boarding school she thought all males younger than he…

But what was it he was going to say? It was so hard to capture a feeling and then make it understood, even to Jess, even to himself sometimes. He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in th…

[...] She was divorced now, living in Toms River, and emailed to say that people having opinions about what happened even though they didn’t have the first clue would be the hardest part, but that Jess should just remember that they don’t know anything, it was no one’s business but hers.

“Jenny,…

Whatever Jess might have said to object, she swallowed back. “Okay,” she said. What harm? He was different than he was before she left. She’d first noticed when they were in the basement of the bar. Something in the way he held himself apart from her. Something about the solemn way he listened as s…

She went to the spice rack and removed this and that. She measured rice into a small pot, covered the rice with water. Never in a million years could Malcolm have looked at the random things she assembled and make his mind see a meal.

“Plenty here,” she said. Malcolm lit the pilot on the stove a…