It would have meant confessing that I’d hidden it from him for thirty years, that our entire marriage had a room he was never allowed into, that the woman he thought he knew had spent every single night beside him keeping this from him.

How do you say that, at year thirty?

At year forty?

The longer I kept the secret, the more monstrous the keeping of it became, and the more impossible it was to ever set down.” She looked at her hands.

“That is the trap of it, Hannah.

A secret you keep too long stops being about whatever you’re hiding.

It becomes about the hiding.

And the hiding has no scar to point to, no fire to explain it.