A role like that is comfortable to occupy from the outside, because it looks like belonging, and it takes a long time to feel the difference between a seat you are given because you are wanted and a seat you are given because of what you carry to it.

Chapter 5 — The Birthday

The dinner that ended it was my father-in-law’s sixty-fifth birthday, at a restaurant the family had chosen, the kind with a private alcove and a wine list bound in leather and a server who introduces himself by name.

I knew before we arrived how the evening was going to go, the way you know the shape of a wave before it reaches you, and I remember sitting in the passenger seat while Derek drove, looking out at the ordinary streetlights, feeling something in me go very quiet and very clear.

It was not anger, exactly, or not only anger.