A locked door is no different from a redacted line on a tax return.

It is a boundary drawn in iron and wood, and it exists for one reason, which is that someone has decided there is a thing on the other side of it that you are not permitted to see.

The question is never whether the redaction means something.

It always means something.

The only question is what.

I stood in the quiet of the carriage house and understood, with the particular clarity that comes late at night, that the gentle corrections and the quiet demands were not a passing storm of wedding nerves.

They were the first solid bars of a cage, and I had spent the last nine months helping him build it, handing him the pieces one at a time and calling it love.