Rebecca Serle

And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has to run to sea.

—MARIANNE WIGGINS, EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN

David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before. He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.

I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve creamer.

I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished

But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment.

But Bella has always been one for a project. She loves potential, possibility, an unknown terrain such as this one. The only trouble is she rarely, if ever, sees anything through. I’ve seen her spend obscene amounts of money on projects and renovations that never ultimately come together.

“I’m not your project. I’m not some little girl you have to save. You don’t know what’s better for me than I do.”

That I hadn’t already entangled myself so deeply—marriage, a house, a life that is not movable, at least not without destruction.

The difference between being good and bad at something is just interest,” Carol says. “Would you like to learn?”