The episode was the culmination of a long withdrawal that each of us had made from the other—for some time, our mutual unhappiness had felt like too delicate or intimate a subject to broach. I knew I wasn’t blameless. The hard-to-fathom part, really, was that she’d hidden it from me. It felt so old-fashioned, predicated on such a rigid understanding of who we could be together. In bed, in the dark, I told her that, if we wanted to try again, we would have to redraw the map. We spent the days that followed talking more openly than we had in years—about our girls, our childhoods, old lovers, doubts and desires we’d each been afraid to confess.
This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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