You know the feeling. You have loved someone from a distance you built yourself, convinced that the distance was wisdom, that waiting was patience, that doing good work quietly was the same as being worthy of the life you actually wanted. You have carried something — a failure, a silence, an old error you could not name to anyone — and let it shrink the space you were willing to occupy in the world. You have told yourself this was responsibility. You have wondered, in the hours that honest...