I have to tell you what the thing was, because I have been careful not to say it so far. When I was twenty-two years old, right at the end of my senior year of college, I had an abortion. I was dating a boy named Trevor at the time — a boy I have not spoken to in eleven years, who is now married and has two kids and lives somewhere in Connecticut — and I had gotten pregnant accidentally, and Trevor had said "whatever you want to do" and I had made the decision by myself, and I had driven to the clinic by myself, and I had, because I was twenty-two and scared, never told a single person. Not my mother. Not my sister. Not my therapist. Nobody. For nine years. And then in April of last year, nine months before my wedding, I had a conversation at Cecile's apartment — the apartment she had just moved into with her boyfriend at the time — that had somehow, through two bottles of Pinot Noir and a long conversation about August's very Catholic family and how I had been stressed about them, turned into me sitting on her kitchen floor and telling her, for the first time in my life, the one thing I had been carrying since I was twenty-two. I made her swear. She swore.