There's something simultaneously scary and thrilling about keeping a secret. Scary, because you know what you know would have irreversible effects on certain people if they discovered what you were hiding, but thrilling, because you have the power to withhold or divulge information that could change the course of the lives of certain people completely--including your own.

Then the paranoia sets in. Every phone call is someone ratting you out. Every sideways glance people share is about what you think they don't know. Then it becomes almost physically impossible to keep your lips and your tongue and your vocal cords from acting independently of your head and robbing yourself of that heady power. Every time you see the person or people from whom your secret is kept, you find yourself speaking extra slowly to keep from letting anything accidentally slip out, until they become convinced you have gone mental and start avoiding you altogether.

I can handle keeping secrets. It's my forte. But he just couldn't live with it, and there is something exciting about being on the verge of changing your life and the lives of everyone around you with a few little words, so I decided to let this happen. We made a battle plan: first Ned and Irene, then Jack, Fi, Clu, and Annie.

It never occurred to me that we had left someone out.

I became aware of his displeasure with our connection the morning after our decision to tell the secret. Carey had gone out early as usual, so as not to be noticed by the other members of the household; the sun wasn't yet up, and I was somewhere between awake and asleep when it happened. My entire hand suddenly seemed to be on fire. The sensation jarred me awake and I stared at the offending hand in horror until I realized that my hand was cold to the touch and it was the ring that was causing my discomfort. The Celtic thumb ring seemed to be angry, glowing furiously. My instinct was to yank it off and throw it across the room or out the window, but when I made the move to do exactly that, I only ended up with burned fingers and the conviction that the ring was stuck. Ugh. The pain was starting to dull, anyway. I was ready to go right back to sleep when I finally figured out what was going on.

"Oh, fuck off," I whispered, so as not to risk waking anyone. Wherever he was, I knew he was listening hard enough to hear. "You have no right to object to anything, so just stop it. You know what I finally figured out? I wasted all those years feeling sad and sorry for myself that you had been taken from us. But you weren't taken from us. You left. Everything you ever should have wanted was right here. I was right here. We just weren't enough for you. It was your choice to leave that night when any sane man would have stayed. So I loved you, and I know you loved me, and I'm sorry about what happened, but you don't have any right to stand in the way of the rest of my life anymore."

The pain grew more intense for a moment, and then faded slowly. I took off the ring for a second, and drew back my hand with the intention of pitching it as I'd first been inclined to do, but thought better of it and slipped it back on my finger. I could talk the talk, but I wasn't ready to completely forsake the past for the future just yet.

Our argument had fully awakened me, though, and with this much angry adrenaline pumping through my veins there would be no more sleep this night. Instead I padded down the hall into Jack's room and weaved a precarious path through the clutter on the floor. I sat down on the end of the bed and took a long last look at a son who believed in his mother. I could have cried, just thinking of how he would never look at me the same way again after he found out. When I hadn't registered any particular objection to his relationship with Annie, she had squealed "Wicked!" and thrown her arms around me and practically started calling me mom on the spot. I wondered if he had worried about my reaction to that revelation the same way I was so worried about his now.

I knew him well enough to know what it would be: intense anger, disbelief, resentment. And that would all give way, eventually, to a grudging acceptance. But things would never, ever be the same. Not even if I ended my attachment to Carey within five minutes of telling him about it. It would be the very fact that I hadn't been honest with him from the beginning, not to mention the unalterable fact that Carey had been a part of our family for so long that saying it now, "our relationship," felt strangely Oedipal and morally outrageous. Of course, that didn't change who we were apart from the other people in our lives, or how we related as individual adults--because he was an adult, and I didn't initiate this, I pointed out to... well, no one. Just practicing, I guess.

In a strange way it felt like I was saying goodbye to Jack, like one of us was about to die. I guess death is something we live with our whole lives until that final moment. The past dies with every new morning; potential dies with every wasted second. A relationship dies and a new one springs up in its place.

Maybe in order to really live, you have to let yourself die a little every day...