“It’s all weird!” he said. Aaron could get shouty when he was confused, like if he raised his voice, the world would understand that it needed to clarify some shit before things got out of hand. “I am mad that you didn’t tell me, that you lied to me, but I am also mad that you keep putting the poster up and you have it in the house, and you seem obsessed with something that happened twenty years ago.”

“It happened to me, though,” I said. “It happened to me, so I am obsessed with it. It’s confusing. I can’t explain it all in thirty minutes and then everything will be fine. But, Aaron, and I need you to understand, okay? I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad that I made it. And I am never going to feel bad that I made it.”

“Do you feel bad that you never told me?” he asked, and he looked like he was going to cry.

“I do. Of course I do. But I never told anyone. I never told my mom, okay? I never told anyone else about it. But, like, would you not have married me?”

Aaron didn’t say anything.

“Aaron?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It’s like . . . I think it would have been better if you said you’d cheated on me. It would make more sense, you know? You’ve done something, and it is going to change our lives, whether I want it to or not, and I don’t really know how to express how freaking mad I am about it.”

“I understand that you are mad, and I know that you have every ri—”

“And I feel angry that, if this woman hadn’t found out, you never would have told me. I would have died and not known.”

“I am so sorry. I really am.” I was about to ask him if he’d ever done anything that he’d regretted before, to get him to understand, but I knew his answer would be something like stealing a pack of gum when he was six, because he was so lovely and honest and had never lied to me about anything. And I had made people die from insanity. I just stopped trying to explain myself.

“And, I hate this, but I guess for as long as we live, I’ll know that there was this thing you were going to keep hidden from me. And I guess I’ll never know if there’s more.”

I made a weird sound, like I was testing to see if I was still breathing. I was.

“Is there more?” he asked.

“More what?” I made the sound again.