But I hadn’t really forgotten and it certainly hadn’t been nothing much. Truth was, I was badly shaken by the thought of what I’d been about to do. For if those high men hadn’t interrupted me, I’d have started telling Trueheart about the Secret Story. Women are just as good as men . . . Having a lot of stuff doesn’t make you more important . . . Don’t trust a man who thinks the story is all about him . . . I’d been about to tell her all of that, along with the story that came with it about how our Mother Gela herself had told it to her daughters and asked them to keep it secret and pass it on to their daughers in turn through the generations.

How could I have even considered doing that, I asked myself now, when I’d have been giving Trueheart the burden of a secret that she’d have to keep forever, unless she wanted to get me thrown out of Michael’s Place and sent away from my kids and my friends? How could I have put her in the position of making that choice? It wasn’t as if I didn’t have my own daughter to pass it on to if I really had to tell it to someone. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that Trueheart hated secrets. For hadn’t she always refused to divide her heart in the way that I’d done with Mary, showing one part of myself but holding another part back? Trueheart was braver than me and more honest with herself. She refused to hide, she refused to pretend to believe something that she didn’t really believe. That was why she kept saying the things she did, however many times her dad hit her. There was no way it would have been fair to have told her the Secret Story, and put her in the position of either wrecking my life, or having to keep a big big secret. I felt myself shaking just at the thought of what I’d been about to do, shaking like I shook once long ago when I was a kid, when I’d slipped and nearly fallen down the high steep cliff at Nob Head.