Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

The philosopher’s story, which began as the story of a good-looking man whose less beautiful wife did not want to sleep with him, with all the attendant miserly agonies of dwindling passion and love, turned into the story of a man who wanted to sleep with the tattooed masseuse he saw for his back pain. She says she wants to run away with me to Big Sur, he texted early one bright morning. The next time we met I sat across from him at a coffee shop as he described the hips of the masseuse. His passion didn’t seem dignified in the wake of what he had lost in his marriage; rather, it seemed perfunctory.

For the briefest of moments you want to reach across with your small hands that he loved—Does he still love them now? Where does the love of hands go when it dies?—and hold his face in them and say, Oh fuck I’m sorry for betraying you. I was terrifically hurt and angry, and you stole several years from my life. It wasn’t regular, what you did, and now here I am. Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I’m scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you. I’ve gained thirty pounds. I’ve been kicked out of school a few times. My father has just killed himself. I take all these medications, look in my bag, there’s a shitload of them. I’m a girl with the pills of an old woman. I should be dating boys with weed breath but instead I fully personified my victim costume. I’m hanging by a fawn hanger at Party City. You never wrote back.

Everything is clicking into place. When West Fargo plays Fargo South in the girls’ soccer semifinals, the coach calls Maggie up and she begins to shake all over like a small bird. He tells her they need her muscle out there. They lose, but it’s because of her that they almost don’t. The air is crisp, the day sunny, and she remembers thinking, I have the rest of my life to do this, and anything else I want.

And when Jennifer says, Hey Lina, Aidan thinks you’re cute, and we’re gonna have us a double date tonight, this whole world with all its Fridays that feel like Tuesdays and its meat loaf and bullshit dies and a whole new life begins.

Everything that happens on this night she will hold on to forever, the feeling of finally getting what she wants. The idea that it is a real thing that happens, that a dream can come true.

One day Aidan is going to drink too much, he is going to have kids and a job that doesn’t pay enough to buy the propane for the grill for the birthday parties in the summer. One day Aidan is going to have a big gut and a good deal of regret. He will not be a marine or an astronaut or a ballplayer. He will not sing in a band or swim in the Pacific. Outside of his kids and his wife and the things he will have done for them (which count, but they also do not, in that way a man needs something in outer space to count) he will not have done anything anyone will really remember. Except for who he was to one woman. He was everything.

The following morning, Sloane opened her eyes and his were already open and looking at her and it felt utterly distinctive and contained and so she said, somewhat jokingly, Do you think that we should be exclusive?

There were a number of children’s toys neatly placed on bookshelves. In the kitchen there was rice cereal in the pantry, Medela bottles with mushroom nipples drying on a rack.

Richard had his head propped up with the heel of his hand. A wide bar of sunshine lit up the dust on the floor.

I thought, he said, that we already were.

The individuals involved can rarely tell you the precise moment. That’s because it’s impossible. One would have to admit seeking something that feels unsavory, alien. A husband who desires to enter another body, to hold another breast. A wife who wants to see her husband want someone else, so that she may want him as much as she’d like to. A third person who is not frankly loved in the world, who enters a room as a cipher in a tank top. A husband who makes the first move. A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third person who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops. It is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies.

How silly, she was thinking, to use the word ready. When can you be ready for anything? Or is life, in fact, a continuum of things you must prepare for, and only with perfect preparation can you exist in the present?

Maggie quits. This is how Maggie handles adversity. If someone criticizes her in the wrong way, not taking the time to tell her that she is still worth something, she doesn’t try to do better. She just says, Fuck it, fuck yourself. She forsakes what she loves. She doesn’t have advisers telling her to relax, to hang back and think it over. To work hard on JV and prove the coaches wrong. Her old man is strong, but drunk. He has been trying to get a new job since being laid off from the one he’s held his whole life, but he doesn’t take the right steps.