“I woke a few hours later too hot, stifling in the bedclothes. I switched on the lamp beside the bed. R. slept so deeply I never had to worry about waking him on the nights I couldn’t sleep, when I spent hours beside him reading or writing. But this time he did wake, or half wake, as I lay with a book propped on my stomach, he turned toward me and linked his arm through mine before settling back into sleep, his face pressed against my shoulder. I looked at him for a long moment before going back to my book. They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before.”
—“The Frog King,” Garth Greenwell