And the whole time, he is generous in the way that costs him nothing — a compliment, a promise, a vague someday — so that you cannot even point to a cruelty, cannot say he is unkind to me, because on the surface he is not, he is only careful, and the carefulness is always, always aimed at you and never at him.

I did not know I was being made small.

That is the terrible efficiency of it.

By the time I stood in that doorway, I had lived so long inside the scarcity that I had stopped experiencing it as something done to me and started experiencing it as the shape of the world itself, the price of things, the way life was.

The necklace on Camila’s neck did not just reveal an affair.