“‘Do you really think people change, or just seem to change?’ Sheila said, scanning the crowd. She would just as soon take the opposite position. She was like that. She never betrayed guilt about what she was doing to him, and that she behaved so normally around him made him think she either loved him so much that her feelings for other men didn’t affect her feelings for him, or that she didn’t love him at all. ‘Because I think everything is already there inside of you,’ she went on. ‘What you are. By the time childhood is over. What I think is that you just become this purer and purer version of what you already are.’

“‘You mean who you already are.’

“‘No. That’s not what I meant,’ softly, thoughtfully, as if to herself.”

—April Ayers Lawson, from “Virgin”
Photography credit Gianni Berengo Gardin (via)