Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a… - Michael Cunningham

"Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, "Lovely boy."

"My wife's insanely younger brother. He's one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean."

"I know exactly what you mean."

Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters' story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who's tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing and getting stoned by way of occupations, currently in Australia."

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.