Henry is forgetting her name. Margaret has learned to live with that.

What she hasn't learned to live with is the particular loneliness of caring for him, lifting him, bathing him, learning the weather of his face, while slowly ceasing to exist and becoming invisible inside her own marriage.
Then Daniel comes to bathe her husband. He is a nurse. He is younger. He is kind in ways that cost him nothing. He makes Henry laugh, and Margaret stands in the doorway listening to a sound she had forgotten this house could still hold. She sees Daniel clearly. His gift for closeness, his history of consequences. She sets this knowledge down inside herself.

Then she pours the tea. 

The Lucid Hours is a novel about what happens in the space between knowing better and doing it anyway. About a woman who has spent thirty-one years making a virtue of not asking. About guilt, which is not the opposite of desire.

And about a box, somewhere in the house, that Henry keeps asking her to burn.