I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.

You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.