I looked down and traced the stripes of my sneaker with my index finger. “My secret is that I slept with someone, then outed her while keeping myself in the closet.”

The silence felt epic, and I wondered if mine was worse than everyone else’s.

“Why did you do that?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Because I’m terrible? And a coward? “I guess I wanted to see what the reaction would be overseas to that sort of thing.” I raised my shoulders. “I’m not really sure why I did it.”

“Maybe you were scared,” Richard suggested.

“Maybe,” I said.

In New York several years after the wedding, I stood in the main quad of Columbia University’s campus and watched a live feed from inside the auditorium, where President Ahmadinejad of Iran spouted incendiary statements about his country’s superiority. When asked about Iran’s horrific treatment of its gay citizens—half a dozen men had been publicly executed over the previous two years—Ahmadinejad proudly announced that there were no homosexuals in the entire country. His negation of their existence, uttered through a crazed smile, seemed simultaneously ridiculous and threatening.

I looked at Richard and continued, “But I know being scared doesn’t excuse it.”

“Do you want to ask your group members if they think you’re a bad person?”

I looked up at my roommate just as she looked down and shook her head. “Molly,” I said, my voice practically a whisper, “do you think I’m a bad person?”

Molly kept staring at the floor, refusing to look at me. She sighed. “I knew you were going to ask me,” she said. “I just think you should’ve told me that you’re a homosexual.”

“Bisexual,” I corrected, cringing at her use of that word and hearing the echoes of Ahmadinejad’s voice. “The occasion didn’t really present itself.”

“I get it, but it seems like a pretty big thing not to mention.”

I stared at the ceiling, my heart thumping. I wanted to point out that I hadn’t actually lied, though she was right to imply that I hadn’t been entirely honest, either. I’d deliberately sidestepped pronouns and specifics in our brief conversations about Anna. But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.

“I would like to at least have had the option of switching roommates, not that I necessarily would’ve,” Molly continued. “I just feel like I’ve been betrayed.”