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curve of her left arm. A small bead of pink juice from a raspberry still
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sitting in one of the dishes bled into the white of her shirt. I picked up 02
the now empty fruit bowl— she’d made it herself at a pottery class
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a few years earlier— and the jug of cream and followed her into the
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kitchen at the back of the flat.
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This flat— their flat— was testament to their relationship. Charles
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had paid the hefty deposit, as Charles paid for most things, but at Mar-
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nie’s insistence. She had known instantly that the flat was meant for
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them, and it won’t surprise you to know that persuasion has always
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come very naturally to Marnie.
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When they moved in, it was little more than a hovel: small, dark,
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filthy, damp, spread over two floors and desperately unloved. But Mar-
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nie has always been a visionary; she sees things where others cannot.
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She finds hope in the darkest of places— laughably, in me— and trusts
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herself to deliver something exceptional. I have always envied that self-15
confidence. It comes, for Marnie, from a place of stubbornness. She has
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no fear of failure, not because she has never failed, but because failure 17
has only ever been a detour, a small diversion, on a journey that has
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ultimately led to success.
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She worked tirelessly— evenings, weekends, using all of her annual
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leave— to build something beautiful. With her small hands, she tore
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wallpaper, sanded doors, painted cupboards, smoothed carpet, laid floor-
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boards, sewed blinds: everything. Until these rooms emitted the same
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warmth that she does; a quiet confidence, a recognizable yet indefinable
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sense of home.
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Marnie loaded the bowls into the dishwasher, leaving a space be-
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tween each.
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“They clean better this way,” she said.
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“I know,” I replied, because she said the same thing every week,
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because I made the same noise— a tiny grunt— every week, because it
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seemed such a waste of water to me.
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“Things are going well with Charles,” she said.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
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A prickle climbed my spine, pulling me straight, forcing air into my
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lungs.
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We had only talked about their relationship once before then and it
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had been a conversation fraught with the long, twisted history of a very
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old friendship. Ever since, we had spoken only in practical terms: their
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plans for the weekend; the house they might someday buy far beyond
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the outer limits of London; his mother riddled with cancer, living in
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Scotland and dying a very slow, painful, lonely death.
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We had not, for example, discussed the fact that they had been to-
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gether for three years and that several months earlier I had found
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unexpectedly— and I know I shouldn’t have been looking— a diamond
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engagement ring hidden in the depths of Charles’s bedside table. Nor
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had we discussed the fact that, even without that ring, they were ca-
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reering toward a permanent commitment that would bind them eter-
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nally, in a way that— even after almost twenty years— Marnie and I had
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never been bound.
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We had not discussed the fact that I hated him.
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“Yes,” I replied, because I was afraid that a full sentence, perhaps
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even a two- syllable word, would send our friendship hurtling into chaos.
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“Don’t you think?” she said. “Don’t you think that things are look-
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ing good for us?”
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I nodded and poured the remaining cream from the jug back into its
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plastic supermarket container.
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“You think we’re right for each other, don’t you?” she asked.
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I opened the fridge door and hid behind it, slowly— very slowly—
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returning the cream to the top shelf.
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“Jane?” she asked.
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“Yes,” I replied. “I do.”
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That was the first lie I told Marnie.
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I wonder now— most days, in fact— if I hadn’t told that first lie,
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would I have told the others? I like to tell myself that the first lie was 32N
the least significant of them all. But that, ironically, is a lie. If I had been 9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 8
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honest that Friday evening, everything might have been— would have
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been— different.
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I want you to know this now. I thought I was doing the right thing.
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Old friendships are like knotted rope, worn in some parts and thick and
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bulbous in others. I feared that this thread of our love was too thin, too 05
frayed, to bear the weight of my truth. Because surely the truth— that
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I had never hated anyone the way I hated him— would have destroyed
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our friendship.
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If I had been honest— if I had sacrificed our love for theirs— then
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Charles would almost certainly still be alive.
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01
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The
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Second Lie
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01
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Chapter Two
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k
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T
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his, then, is my truth. I don’t mean to sound so dramatic, but I
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think you deserve to know this story. I guess I think that you
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need to know this story. It is as much yours as it is mine.
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Charles is dead, yes, but that was never my intention. In truth, it
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never occurred to me that he would ever be anything other than pain-
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fully, permanently present. He was one of those overwhelming, domi-
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nant people: the loudest voice, the grandest gestures, taller and broader 18
and stronger and better than anyone else in any room. You might have
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said that he was larger than life, which now, of course, feels rather
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ironic. That said, the simple fact of his being seemed evidence enough
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that he would always be.
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For the first years of my life— and, I suppose, this is true for the first 25
years of most lives— my family formed a framework. The big choices,
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those that defined my everyday— where I lived, who I spent time with,
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even what I called myself— were not mine at all. My parents were the
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puppeteers dictating the shape of my life.
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Eventually, I was expected to make my own choices: what to play
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and with whom and where and when. My family had been everything,
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the only thing, until they became but the foundations from which I
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built an identity of my own. It was refreshing to discover that I was, in 03
fact, my own entity and yet it was a little overwhelming, too.
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But I was lucky. I found a companion.
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Marnie and I soon became inseparable. We looked nothing alike and
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yet our teachers regularly called us by the other’s name. Because we
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were never one without the other. We sat side by side in every lesson
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and walked between classrooms together and traveled home on the
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same bus at the end of the day.
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I hope that one day you experience a similar friendship. You can tie
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yourself into a teenage love in a way that feels eternal, bonded by new
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experiences and a newfound sense of freedom. There is something so
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enchanting about a first best friend at twelve. It is intoxicating to be so 14
needed, to crave someone so acutely, and that feeling of being so com-
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pletely entwined. But these early bonds are unsustainable. And some-
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day you will choose to extricate yourself from this friendship in the
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pursuit, instead, of lovers. You will extract yourself limb by limb, bone 18
by bone, memory from memory, until you can exist independently,
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until you are again one person where once you were two.
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We were still two, Marnie and me, when— after university— we
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moved into the flat in Vauxhall. It was modern, in a new build erected
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less than a decade earlier, surrounded by other similar buildings with
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other similar flats, all off corridors with blue carpet and behind identi-24
cal pine doors. It had plastic wood- effect flooring, sleek white kitchen 25
units, and soulless magnolia walls. There were spotlights in every
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room— the bedrooms, too— and peach tiles on the bathroom floor. It
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felt cold somehow, wintry, and yet it was always too warm. But it was
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our haven from the fiercely bright lights and the never- ending noise of 29
a cosmopolitan city in which neither of us, at that time, felt entirely
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comfortable.
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Things were different then. We discussed our diaries over cereal
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and delegated responsibilities for the day: a new bottle of shampoo, bat-
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teries for the remote, something for dinner. We walked side by side to
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the tube station. We boarded the same carriage. It would have made
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sense for me to board at the other end, so that my exit was in front of
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me when I disembarked, but our lives were so intricately woven that
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traveling separately would have seemed ludicrous.
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We rushed home from work to cement the gaps that had opened
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over the course of a single day. We boiled the kettle and turned on the
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oven and laughed at ridiculous colleagues and sobbed over terrible
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meetings. We were intimate, cohabiting in a way that bonded us: shared
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pints of milk in the fridge, shoes in a pile behind the front door, books 11
mingled on shelves, framed photographs perching on windowsills. We
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were so thoroughly embedded in each other’s lives that a crack, how-
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ever small, seemed impossible.
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We had little money and little time and yet every few weeks we
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ventured out to a new corner of this new world, to visit a restaurant or
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a bar and to explore a new part of this new city. Marnie was freelancing
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alongside her job and was always looking for something to write about.
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She dreamed about being the first to recognize a restaurant that was
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later granted a Michelin star. She had worked in the marketing team for
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a chain of pubs since graduating but, just a few months in, had decided
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that she wanted to do something more creative, more rewarding, more
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intimate, too. She had started writing a blog about food: collating infor-23
mation and restaurant reviews and eventu
ally writing her own recipes
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as well.
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That was the beginning of it, the most exciting part probably. Soon,
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her audience began to expand rapidly. At the request of her online fol-
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lowers, she started recording her own cookery videos. She accepted
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sponsorship from a high- end kitchenware company, who filled our flat
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with cast- iron pans and pastel ramekins and more utensils than two
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people could ever possibly need. She was offered a regular column in a
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newspaper. But at first it was just us, flicking through the free maga-
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zines to find the latest new places to visit.
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I think you can tell a lot about a relationship by the way two people
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dine together in public. Marnie and I loved to watch as couples entered
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hand in hand, groups of men in tailored suits grew louder and louder,
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expanding to fill the available space, the illicit affair, the anniversary 07
meal, the very first date. We liked to read the room, to guess the pasts
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and predict the futures of the other patrons, telling stories of their lives 09
that we hoped might be true.
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If you had been one of those other customers, sitting at one of those
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other tables, playing that same game and watching us instead, you
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would have seen two young women, one tall and fair, one shrunken and
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dark, entirely comfortable in each other’s company. I think you might
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have known that we enjoyed a friendship with strong branches and
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coiled roots. You would have seen Marnie— without thinking, without
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asking, without needing to— reach over to take the tomatoes from my
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plate. You might have seen me, in response, take the slithers of pickle
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or slices of cucumber from hers.
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But Marnie and I haven’t dined alone in three years, not since she
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moved in with Charles. We are never so at ease now as we were back
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then. Our worlds are no longer entwined. I am now an intermittent
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guest in the story of her life. Our friendship is no longer its own in-
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dependent thing, but a skin tag, a protrusion that subsists within an-
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other love.
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I did not think then— and I do not think now— that Marnie and
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Charles had a love greater than ours. And yet I understood implicitly