While I was crushing her pills, she was meeting in secret with Arthur Vance.

While I thought I was carrying her, she was, in the way still available to her, carrying me — building a wall around my future, hiding a key, drafting the words that would set me free.

The person I had spent three years believing was wholly dependent on me turned out to have been, in the ways that would matter most, saving my life.

I have come to think this is truer of the people we care for than we usually let ourselves know.

The dependent are not only takers.

The very old, the very sick, the ones we bathe and feed and think of as burdens to be borne — they are watching us, all the time, more closely than anyone, because we are the whole of their world.