Free The year She Fell by Alicia Rasley

answer. I just walked away from him, past the circulation desk, into the stacks of encyclopedias, my sneakers making no sound on the marble floor. I didn’t look back, but eventually I heard the door open and then close again, and knew he was gone.
    I meant to do it—meant to research that long-ago summer, meant to seek out the truth about Tom and the boy’s mother. Back home that afternoon, I even got out the journals again and read them over for clues. But my heart wasn’t in the task. I didn’t want to know.
    Or rather, I didn’t want to have to find out for myself. I wanted Tom to tell me. It would mean—it would mean I mattered more than anything else, that what I wanted was more important to him than whatever he was concealing.
    But his refusal meant the opposite.
    I sat in my childhood room, on the window seat over the garden, my fingers resting on the journal, and thought, just like the girl I’d been when I still lived here, I’ve never been anyone’s favorite. It was silly, childish, but true in some primal sense. I’d grown up in middle-child purgatory. Dainty clever Laura was Daddy’s little girl, and proud fierce Cathy was Mother’s. Even after Cathy left home, I didn’t move into the coveted maternally favored slot—Theresa, the new daughter, did.
    And now I realized I probably wasn’t even my husband’s favorite. In my sudden self-pity, I could just imagine nursing him in his final hours, and bending close to hear his last whisper . . . another woman’s name.
    It was pathetic. I was a grown woman. I’d long since gotten over my childhood sense of invisibility. I knew that I mattered, that I’d made a difference in at least a few lives. But . . .
    But from all my years of teaching and now of pastoral counseling, I’d learned that you never quite stop being a child. Adult relationships were always only one precarious step removed from replicating some childhood dynamic. I remember mothers coming to parent-teacher conferences and whispering, “She won’t let me have boyfriends. She’s run off three men already,” just as if their first-grader were their own puritanical mother. And I’d counseled husbands and wives who competed as fiercely as siblings, always sure the other was getting more attention or happiness or good fortune.
    And here I was, falling into the same trap, thinking of Tom as the love-withholder, and me as the helpless child.
    But I wasn’t helpless. I wasn’t. I deserved to be first in someone’s life. I didn’t deserve a man who kept hidden and cherished what must have been a secret passion for someone else. I could . . . leave him to it; leave him to his memories and illusions. I could just . . . leave.
    I let myself feel that for just a minute, pushing back all the objections my practical mind raised—my daughter, my job, my house, my life. I could let go of the struggle to find meaning in this marriage, and accept the reality that it was built on a lie. I could—
    But it wasn’t just this secret of his that made me consider the clarity and control of aloneness. It was that old longing to escape the curse of a long marriage—the grievances and obligations and patterns that build up, the half-truths and misunderstandings that take root, the tangle life becomes.
    I’d cared too much for too long, and even when it was right, even when he seemed the only one in the world who knew me truly, I felt a sense of lostness. I’d lost myself in him too long ago to remember, and every now and again, I tried to seize me back.
    This time, maybe I would succeed.
    It was ten minutes after six before I remembered that Jackson was going to be on the evening news. I can’t imagine why I cared, why I grabbed Laura by the arm as she passed through towards the kitchen and insisted she come sit with me and watch. It wasn’t as if love had much merit for me these days, or matchmaking held much charm. I was probably just trying to distract myself from my own problems—or