Foster

I go down steps until I reach the water. I breathe and hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back.

‘Daddy,’ I keep calling him, keep warning him. ‘Daddy.’

Now that I know I must go home, I almost want to go, to get it over with. I wake earlier than usual and look out at the wet fields, the dripping trees, the hills, which seem greener than they did when I came. I think back to this time and it seems so long ago, when I used to wet the bed and worry about breaking things.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’
‘What?’
‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

Where there's a secret, there's shame – and shame is something we can do without.

Безліч людей стільки всього втратили тільки тому, що не скористалися чудовою нагодою нічого не казати.

You don’t ever have to say anything. Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention.