Everything I Never Told You

Like Fowler at the end of The Quiet American, she is looking for someone to whom she can confess her guilt, own her complicity. But when she admits her deed to her father, Juan Pablo, she gets adulation in return. Klay’s prose is stirring and precise:

While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different

That child who she thought had been her opposite but who had, deep inside, inherited and carried and nursed that spark her mother had long ago tamped down, that same burning certainty that she knew right from wrong. She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it:

There is no thinking, no rationale, and certainly no conversation when Emma cries. My body responds to her in a way that is purely primal, that I have no willful control over. She cries: my blood pressure climbs. My limbs become tense, my neck locks into a rigid posture. My uterus contracts, the stitches in my incision do their best to give with th

What do you want? Sylvie wouldn’t have asked this question before, because she would have been afraid of the answer, but she wanted to be deeply and truly herself and to experience the world in the deepest and truest way. She’d been compartmentalizing herself for a long time, certainly since her father had died. She was one person with Julia, a sli