How being a good secret keeper is important skill in every day life

Laurel’s mother’s secret became for her [Laurel] something much more than just an event that happened many years ago. Throughout her life, Laurel “felt that all the absences in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question, something that had been there since she was sixteen years old— her mother's unspoken secret.” This secret became like an invisible metaphorical guide through all her life.