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[...] That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena …

This is chamomile! I’m fine. I just mean I made the choice to give up my autonomy to him, to trade it for what felt like protection, or deliverance—after how many gender studies classes? How stupid am I?

Well, you skipped class a lot.

You know—I almost do want it to be true. The permission to just fuck around and live alone forever and never need anyone else’s company in particular, and for that never to seem lacking. But maybe it’s the fact that the body decays that makes this kind of intimacy important.

So that someone find…

Tilt your head back, he’d said with the exact intimate tone her father had used when she’d gotten a bloody nose on his watch as a kid, and later she found out that tilting backward is the exact wrong thing to do for a bleeding nose, but she did as she was told, both as a girl and right then, and ta…

[...] Edie won’t tell Marie tonight about the time he threw a book across the room at her, about how it momentarily woke her up and she almost left until he talked her back down into believing it was her fault, that she had to be better, that she had to be more honest with him, more attentive, more…