from Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

It was then, lying there in the bed beside her sleeping husband, that Margaret Looney realised there was to be an emptying as much as a filling of her heart with love, and that as much as her heart had expanded and grown in the first girlish weeks of love in Donegal, filling her until bursting, now, in the years left, there was to be the slow drop by drop bleeding back of it all. It would all have to be given back, and day after day as the hardship of their life dulled into routine -- window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness -- Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.