I thought about it properly, which meant not going to the first available answer, which was the easy answer, the answer that lived on the surface and was not untrue but was not the whole truth. The easy answer was that I was afraid of my father's marriage, of my mother who had smiled in a white dress and not known what she was walking into, of the portrait torn down the middle, of what love looked like when it was given to the wrong person in the wrong circumstances and had nowhere to go except inward where it became something else entirely.
That was true.
But underneath it was the other thing, the harder thing, the thing that was more specifically mine and less inherited.
"I am afraid," I said slowly, "of becoming dependent on something I did not choose." I paused. "I did not choose th
