The Kind Worth Killing

Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences.

any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves.

Everyone dies, but not everyone has to see someone they love with another person. She struck the first blow.

Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended?

And to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.

Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life?

I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal—of a crow or a fox or an owl—and not of a normal human being. I

I love the beach, everything except the fucking sand, the fucking sun, and the fucking water

No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew. I

I had survived the vulnerability of childhood, and the danger of first love. There was comfort in knowing that I would never be in either of those positions again, that, from now on, I would be the only person responsible for my own happiness.

I always say that two martinis are too many, and three is not enough.

I dreamed of my other family, the imaginary one with boring parents,

My father used to say: every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him—a variation on being mindful of death, I suppose—but I knew what it meant to me.

boys who had been born on third base and thought they hit a triple (as my mother often quoted),

I imagine she acted the way she thought you wanted to see her.

I tried to sleep, falling into a doze as thin as tissue paper,

I know, right. I keep thinking

Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.

The boys I met there could easily have been classified as preppy snobs, boys who had been born on third base and thought they hit a triple (as my mother often quoted),

My younger sister, Emily, who knows me better than anyone in the world, told me recently that my problem with relationships is that I fall in love with every woman I’m attracted to. “Don’t most guys?” I said. “No,” she said. “Most guys just want to sleep with all the women they’re attracted to. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. You call yourself a detective, and you don’t know that?” “Trust me. I also want to sleep with these women.

him. I didn’t love him, but I liked him enough. And he was generous. He let me spend his money without complaining. Not that he really had anything to complain about; as far as I could tell, the money would never run out. Then one morning I woke up in Boston, sun coming through our bedroom window. I looked over at Ted, still deep in sleep, his face pillow-creased. I studied a little patch of dark stubble under his chin that he must have missed while shaving the previous day. He was snoring, lightly, but each ragged breath began with a little nasal hiccup, like his breath had caught on the edge of something. It was infuriating to listen to, and I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life waking up and looking over at the same face, growing older, and older, and snoring more and more. That part was bad enough, but I also knew that, as soon as Ted woke up, he was going to look over at me, and his face was going to look so pleased, and he would say something like, “Hey there, beautiful.” That was the worst. I’d have to smile

need. I would never allow anyone to get that close to me again, to hurt me in the way that Eric had. I was a grown woman now. I had survived the vulnerability of childhood, and the danger of first love. There was comfort in knowing that I would never be in either of those positions again, that, from now on, I would be the only person responsible for my own happiness. I walked back that night to my empty flat, made myself a simple dinner, then settled into my favorite chair to read. A long, uncomplicated life stretched out before me.

most people fetishize life to the point of allowing others to take advantage of them.

I think most people fetishize life to the point of allowing others to take advantage of them.

I swam in the pool, anyway, for the first half of the summer, telling myself that at least I had it to myself. The water turned green, and the bottom and sides became slippery with dark algae. I pretended the pool really was a pond, deep in the woods, in a special place that only I knew about, and my friends were the turtles and the fish and the dragonflies. I swam at dusk, when the cricket whine was at its highest,

I began to see even less of her, because she had started dating a fellow Texan in her program who had a flat in Camden Town. “I know it’s lame that I come all the way to London and end up dating some kid from Lubbock named Nolan, but he’s a cute kid.

But now I had a new reason. I had Lily. I was doing this because of Lily. I was going to kill my wife so that I could be with her. And this reason made more sense than any of the others.