The Secret Year

Once you're out here in the world, nobody cares where you used to live. Who you are, that's what counts.

Believe me," he said, pointing his finger at me like a gun, "no good comes from lying about what you really want.

Like I told you on Thanksgiving, pretending is a lousy way to get through life.

What do you think about when you can't sleep? Sometimes I think about the ocean. I can see it lapping on the shore, waves rolling in one after the other, washing over the sand, never stopping. That's what usually puts me to sleep.

But we'd had only so many nights together, and the notebook had only so many pages, and that world was never going to get any bigger. The truth was that I couldn't have kept her even if she'd lived. At the end, we'd both been pushing at the walls of our secret world, pushing at each other. We'd given each other everything we could. It wasn't enough for either of us anymore.

But we'd only had so many nights together, and the notebook had so many pages, and the world was never going to get bigger.