Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was all part of what kept up a sense of mystery between us at the start. That tension of not knowing but wanting to know. You'd think that after seventeen years of being together and three children and moving together from London to a small town in Massachusetts, this kind of mystery would be dead and gone, the ephemera of early love washed out by practicality. And much of it is. He doesn't charm me anymore. I see how he charms others, how far his accent alone goes in this country to distract and beguile, but it's not the kind of effect that lasts in a marriage. And I am certainly no escape for him anymore, not in the simple sense of being a departure from familiarity. We fight. We disagree. He indulges the children to curry favor with them, suspending my bans on this or that, leaving me to stand alone as the enforcer. I resent not knowing when or if he'll decide the time has come for us to go back to Britain, and I resent that it depends on his work. Not all the time, and not that I can fault him for it entirely, but I'm not quiet about it when it gets to me. Like when I'm rummaging through old furniture in my mother's garage for dressers or side tables because the ones we bought together after our wedding are sitting in storage an ocean away and he doesn't want to ship it all here since maybe we'll be returning soon.

And yet there remains mystery between us. What I want to say is that we still don't know each other, that we're still discovering each other, and of course because it's no longer the beginning it isn't always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition—the not knowing, the wanting to know—but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it's one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I'm the one who's still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment.

Whatever it is, it's not about nationalities anymore, or his family or mine. It's what all that stood in for at the beginning without my realizing it. At least until his episode shortly before our wedding.

That autumn of '63 after our engagement I could tell something was getting to him at work because whenever we met up he'd be more distracted than usual and have less to say. He was the fastest-talking person I'd ever met, that is before Michael started talking, and in the right mood I could just sit back and listen to him go on about the complacency of Harold Macmillan or the latest news in the Profumo affair, he and his friends interrupting and talking over one another, dashing and clever and well oiled with drink. I'd think of my friends who'd gotten married, junior or senior year, to men just like the ones they'd grown up with, headed now to Wall Street or law school, some of them already with three- and four-year-olds, and I'd think, Thank God! I'm not a doll in the house of my mother's imaginings. I got out. And far.

But during that October John's clock began to run more slowly. It wasn't dramatic at first. He didn't talk much about his work but I imagined it was some pressure there that was tiring him out, making him less inclined to spend evenings with friends. He just appeared let down, that was all. Harold Macmillan resigning as prime minister was the sort of thing he would usually have been reading and talking about furiously but he showed barely any interest. It was the evening Kennedy was shot—evening in Britain—that I thought to myself something must be the matter with him because when I appeared at his flat in tears he hugged me and sat me down on the couch and tried to calm me, yet it didn't seem to have reached him at all. I didn't expect him to cry—it wasn't his president—but it was as if I'd told him a distant uncle of mine had expired, obliging him to pat me on the shoulder. It was unnatural.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.