“It was becoming difficult to separate her own decisions from those made by others, for her, on behalf of themselves.”

“Because she'd once made a horrible decision that would haunt her forever, and because the one person in the world she'd trusted without reservation was lying to her.”

“She fought the urge to look away, to hide her own eyes. Struggled against the long-ingrained habit of disguising her own lies, now that she was finally telling the truth.”

“The embarrassment that you weren't independent, your decisions not your own to make.”

“But there’s this giant deception at the foundation of their relationship, their happiness. This impure motive. There was that small mistake that the woman made, uttering the wrong number. And then the man reconstructed an entire intrigue, a big thick plot— a seduction and affair and relationship and marriage proposal, a whole life— around her error and his notice of it. Taking advantage of her lie.But does that make their relationship less real? Does that make it impossible that they genuinely love each other?”

“She spent so much of her new life wanting to get a break from the kids, then the rest of her time impatient to get back to them.”

“So my sister, she slipped through the cracks of the disaster of our family. She became her own disaster.”