It wasn’t so much that I was positive. I just wasn’t fully subscribing to such a negative way of thinking anymore.

I just do the best I can under the circumstances.

People don't change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less

I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Wondering what I’d think of that girl, if I was someone else, seeing how easily she sits in her boyfriend’s lap, laughing, with his arms around her. I would have thought her life was perfect, the way I once thought Cass’s was. It was too easy, I was learning, to just assume things.

Teaching was great for me, because I got to show people how writing can really change the way you see not only yourself but the world.

Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to remember to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning; there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.

Maybe marriage, like life, is'nt only about the big moments, whether they be good or bad. Maybe it's all the small things — like being guided slowly forward, surely, day after day — that stretches out to strengthen even the most tenuous bond.