When I gave up the reading group I ran because Gregor wanted more of my evenings, I did not experience it as loss; I experienced it as love, as the good and generous thing, and the fact that another piece of me went dark that night was invisible to me, because I had been trained since girlhood not to count my own pieces.

That is the trap of it.

The disappearing does not feel like disappearing from the inside.

It feels like being good.

And a whole life can go by, is meant to go by, with a woman mistaking her own erasure for her finest quality, right up until some accident — a cruelty overheard, a ring come loose — cracks the trance, and she sees, all at once, the full length of the corridor she has backed down, and the small dark shape she has let herself become at the end of it.

Chapter 4 — The Kidney