Chapter 1 — The Blue Door

When I got to my parents’ house in Milwaukee, three frightened children were standing behind me, and everything we still owned had been packed into two grocery bags and one cracked suitcase.

The June heat pressed down on my shoulders, but my hands were cold as I knocked on the familiar blue door — the door I had run out of as a teenager and come back through a thousand times since, the door I had never once, in thirty years, imagined would not open for me.

My oldest, nine-year-old Sadie, held the suitcase handle with both hands and studied every window as if she already knew something I hadn’t let myself understand yet.

Six-year-old Maisie had her stuffed fox tucked under one arm. And four-year-old Caleb leaned into my hip and asked, in the bright unbothered way of a child who does not yet know the day is going wrong, whether Grandpa had chocolate milk.

Less than twelve hours before, I had found out that my husband, Grant Fletcher, had been having an affair for nearly eight months.

I had found it the ordinary, humiliating way — his tablet lighting up on the kitchen counter, and me picking it up without thinking, and then not being able to put it down.

Photographs. Hotel confirmations. And messages, so many messages, in which he described our marriage as an arrangement he was managing, an inconvenience he intended to end when the timing became, in his word, favorable.

Financially favorable. Ten years and three children, weighed and found to be a matter of timing.

My father, Howard Larsen, opened the door in an old college sweatshirt, wearing the face of a man who had been expecting an unpleasant chore and was bracing to get through it.

“Dad.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I just need somewhere safe for the kids for a few nights. Until my lawyer helps me figure out what happens next.”

His eyes went to the children, then to the luggage, then, last, to my face.

“Your mother and I have been talking, Lauren. We think it’ll only make things more complicated if you come here.”