What's Your Light Secret?

I didn't understand the ending of this story, although I get the ongoing picture of the main themes. This is 'Light Secrets' by Joseph O'Neill, published in The New Yorker on January 18, 2026.

The narrator had been hearing about this 'nasty rumor' about his friend P., and invited the latter out to lunch to clear up the air. I thought that was a fine thing to do. We hear rumors and gossip all the time. If I hear something about a friend, I would ask her/him out to have a chat. The friendship is worth that much — some bit of trust, a bit of leeway before I make any judgments. 

In his forties, the narrator is also at a stressful point in his life in which he has gone through a divorce, and is unhappily back in the dating circuit, and also applying for jobs that include a background check, fingerprinting requirements and all. But he made time for P. whom he thought was a funny and thoughtful guy and he owed it to him to have a chat and not just believe in that 'nasty rumor'. 

P. says, “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.” He wears his usual gloomy face. With no lessening of the gloom, he says, “But you know what else is true? Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden—the opposite of a dark secret.”

“A light secret,” I suggest.

“Precisely,” P. says.

“Like an anonymous donation?”

P. shrugs. “It could be a lot more interesting than that.”

“Can you give me an example? One of yours?”

“You want me to tell you a light secret? I can’t do that. It’s a secret.”

I would laugh except that P. isn’t joking. I say, “I’d tell you one of mine, but I can’t think of any.” I’m not joking, either.

“Everybody’s got a light secret. Everybody.”

Three weeks later, in a surprising turn of events, the narrator learnt that P. is dead at forty-seven years old. He was found dead in his apartment, and his family said he died of natural causes. At the funeral that was open to everyone who knew P., apparently only two non-family turned up. That included the narrator. Clearly the nasty rumor resulted in a loss of reputation and turned friends against P., whom the narrator thought to be a fairly decent person overall.

There's this mysterious Simon Morgan, who was the other friend at the funeral. P. had earlier mentioned him, but the narrator couldn't place him. Then Simon Morgan got in touch with the narrator and even mailed him a check. The narrator got the chills — he couldn't remember anything about him, couldn't find out anything online, not even when Simon Morgan said he had helped him out while he was a recovering addict. He refused to cash the two-hundred dollar check either.

It boils down to this: Simon Morgan is a self-described “addict.” As part of his recovery program, he has vowed to make amends for the harm he has caused others. To this end, he wants to remind me of the help I gave him back in the day, help that I offered with a pure heart, help that, until now, he has never acknowledged or thanked me for. Enclosed is a check for two hundred dollars, which is the amount I loaned him all those years ago and never requested repayment for.

I don’t cash the check. How could I? I don’t remember him. When Sejal asks me whatever happened to Simon Morgan, I represent to her that I never heard from him again and that Simon Morgan, if that’s his name, must have got me mixed up with someone else.

The story never reveals what this nasty rumor is, and it's a tad exasperating for me, as a nosy reader. I suppose it's not particularly important to know, but who doesn't love a good piece of gossip? 

The ending was completely befuddling. In an interview with the same journal, the author explained why he chose to withhold this information from the readers. The point about leaving readers "slightly in the dark"....... Well, yeah, me. I mean, what..... There're so many scenarios and possibilities. Is this light secret about P. dealing in drugs? If Simon Morgan and his check is the clue to the secret that P. was keeping, then thanks, it's more confusing than ever. 

The story never reveals the nasty rumor about P., and this is just one of several bits of withheld information in the story. Disclosure, or its lack, both shapes the story and is the subject of this story. Were you worried that too much might be withheld?

I gave some thought to what P. might have done, turning over in my mind the various nasty stories that all of us hear, but, in the end, I worried that to reveal the nature of P.’s misdeed would undermine the logic of the story. It’s more damaging, I think, to provide an overly disclosive or illuminating detail than to leave the reader slightly in the dark, as in life. Speaking for myself, I dislike the feeling that I’ve got to the bottom of a story and fully lit up its depths. A short story, like a poem, should always retain an element of mystery.