I filed it away. He was Camilla's.
Then at her seventeenth birthday party I stood next to the dessert table and watched him pour her champagne in the garden, and that feeling was still there, unchanged, stubborn as a stain.
Eleven years.
Loving someone wasn't the problem. Loving someone fully and without reservation was not, in itself, a pathology. Mary had loved my mother like that. My mother had loved me like that. That kind of love made room for you. It didn't require you to get smaller.
So that is not love.
But I kept approaching and then backing away from it.
No oxygen, no reciprocation. When you feed it on scraps and uncertainty and those rare moments when he'd look at you and something would shift in his expression and you'd think, maybe, maybe—
It curdles.
I'd been so busy
