Abruptly she thought of his embarrassment after he’d said she’d better get her own small person. As though he was pointing to something that was clearly an impossibility for her.

And what was her mother talking about at the end there? As though Sarah would be, maybe had been, damaged by loving Graham too much. As though it had unsuited her for someone else. For love.

Always, always, that fucking implication—that her life was empty, that she had no one. It made her angry at her mother whenever she caught this glimpse of how Annie saw her. Tonight, angry at Lucas too. It had been clear to Sarah that he felt he’d pointed out what he must have seen as a problem of hers. Her unpartnered life.

She remembered Thomas’s body suddenly, his turning her over as they made love, pulling her hips up to him, coming into her from behind.

Her hand had loosened on the spoon, and it clunked to the floor behind the couch. “Shit,” she said. She rose on her knees and looked down. There it was. She tried to reach it, to retrieve it. Too far.

But her glance had fallen on a book, the book her father had written—or the book her mother had taken the pictures for. The memoir. It was lying on top of a bunch of other coffee-table-size books on the lowest shelf behind the couch. She could easily reach it, and she did, pulling it up, already anticipating these old familiar pictures—like a history of her life here, in this house, the way it had been. Her father and mother, their friends—all the writers, the artists, the photographers, the parties she’d fallen asleep listening to. She hadn’t looked at it in years.

The book felt odd, thickened and misshapen. Had it gotten wet, somehow? She opened it, and took an audible breath. Page after page, perhaps a third of them, had been ripped out. Some fell on her lap.

It took her a moment to get over her shock. Then, slowly, she began to look at it, at the damage.

There were many pages—from about halfway through the book on to the end—that were intact, so it wasn’t as though someone were removing the images systematically to do something with them. Anyhow, the rips were uneven, incomplete, chaotic. Sometimes a page was gone completely. Sometimes four or five pages had been ripped at once. Some were ripped only halfway through.

How could this have happened? Could Claire somehow have gotten hold of the book and started tearing it apart?

But Claire couldn’t have managed this. She didn’t have the strength for any of it. She would never have been able even to hold the book, let alone tear a page out, or tear multiple pages at the same time.

Her mother, then.

Yes, her mother, the only possibility.

It must have been after her father died, Sarah thought. The despair, and clearly some kind of rage—at what?

Her abandonment?

Or maybe some of those hard things she never got to talk about with Graham. Things hard enough, difficult enough, unresolved enough, to make her tear at this record of her life with him? To make her try to ruin it?

She couldn’t imagine this. She didn’t want to imagine it. She wanted the old version, the old, familiar sorrow. Not this new story. This new sorrow.

She lifted her hands to her face and made a noise at the thought of it.

The book slid off her lap to the floor, the loose pages scattering. She sat up and looked down at the mess.

Then she got up. She went to the stairs and up to the bedroom that used to be hers, the one that had become her mother’s office after Sarah moved to the West Coast. Though the bed was still there, and the bureau, and the desk—covered now with Annie’s papers.

It was completely dark outside the windows. Sarah turned on the bureau light and fished her phone out of her purse.

Thomas’s voice warmed when he heard hers, and Sarah felt some of the anger and confusion leave her. They compared their holidays—he had spent his with his parents, at their retirement community in Seattle. They’d eaten in the common dining room, he said, among the other residents and all their visiting children and grandchildren. “The point there being,” he said, “to make me feel guilty for shirking my job—for me to see what the others had that my poor parents didn’t.”

“And did it work?” she asked.

“Oh, it always works,” he said dismissively. “And then I get pissed about that, because it has worked, and it’s made me feel guilty when I don’t want to. And then they get sad. Or my mother gets sad, sad that I’m pissed. And then my father gets pissed that I’ve made my mother sad. And then we all have another cup of coffee and say goodbye.”

“No fun,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as all that. It’s almost like a predictable routine we go through at this point. We all know how to play our parts.” They were silent for a moment. Sarah thought she could hear him breathing.

He said, “Yours does sound like fun, though.”

“It had its complications too.”

“What kind?”

“Well, every kind, I guess. But I’ll list them for you when I get home tomorrow.” For now she just wanted this ease, this comfort—his voice. His breath.

“But it was also fun. Yes?”

“Parts of it, yes, I have to confess.” She was thinking of the big table, the familiar faces around it. Of Claire. She said, “But of course we did have the grandchild, so that wasn’t an issue.”

“Touché.”

“I’m only teasing.”

“I know.”

When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was quieter. More intimate. “May I tell you this? It’s your voice. Just hearing you say hello. It thrills me.”

She laughed.

“I mean it.”

“Well, we could always keep the light off when we’re together, and you could just listen to my thrilling voice in the dark.”

“Oh, Sarah.” He sounded tired suddenly, and she felt it then, what she’d done. Again. Again she’d made a joke out of a gift he was offering her, a compliment.

She thought of the way he looked—his watchful dark eyes under the smooth flat flesh of his eyelids, the lines of age just beginning at the outer corners. The thick black hair, going slightly gray at the temples. The squarish chin, the strong, graceful body, the lovely light-brown skin. The surprise of his smile, his ready laughter.

Why couldn’t she just let it happen to her, let him say it, let herself feel it—what he meant?

After a moment, she said, “But then, of course, I couldn’t see you. And that’s what I love.”

“Do you?”

“I do,” she said. She laughed, lightly, and said it again. I do.

In the mirror over the bureau, she watched her own face, the way it had softened, become, it seemed to her, almost pretty.

After she’d said good night to Thomas, she stood there, looking at herself. She had thought, when she came east, that she’d finally tell her mother about Thomas—or maybe she’d tell all of them.

What would she have said? That she was involved with someone?

No.

That she loved someone, she loved Thomas. That he loved her.

She’d had an image of announcing something like that at the table at Thanksgiving, she realized. She’d actually spent some time imagining the various responses.

But she hadn’t done it, and now, standing at the bureau, thinking about the evening that had just passed, she thought she understood why not. Because her mother—and Lucas too, she thought—had revealed to her their unchanging, unchanged version of her and her life. Her announcement of her happiness would have seemed to them defensive, something she was offering as a kind of pathetic corrective to their understanding of her. It wouldn’t have the meaning for them that she’d wanted for it. The cleanness, the pure joy.

And it would have become theirs, she thought. They would see her happiness as a kind of capitulation to their expectations, their way of living. They would see it as the beginning of a life like theirs. Married, like all of them—her mother, Frieda, Jeanne, Edith, with all the sad stories they had to tell about that.

Well, maybe not Jeanne. But even her mother, it turned out. The hard things, the doubt about whether she and Graham could have gone on being married. The surprise of it!

She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to change her version of things. Their voices in the night. Their safe, private world.

She thought of her childhood, and Lucas’s, each of them yearning for what they thought the other had. She thought of the sense of isolation she had as a kid, the isolation she had so deliberately and slowly fought her way out of. She thought of Thomas, the miracle of having him in her life, the reward, she couldn’t help feeling sometimes, for her long struggle.

And perhaps they would end up married, she and Thomas. Maybe they’d even have a child. But for now, what they had—the deep connection between them—that was exactly what she wanted, was all she’d ever wanted, she felt. That solace. That safety.

Not marriage—not all the other promises to be made, and then broken. Not the children, the difficult growing up. The wounds inflicted, back and forth, the inevitable disappointments, the unbridgeable distances.

Not that.