Chapter 1 — The Hinge

I had been fixing the same loose hinge on my front door for the better part of an hour, a job that should have taken ten minutes, because I could not keep my mind on it.

I would tighten one screw, test the door, and then find myself staring at nothing, the screwdriver loose in my hand.

It was a bright, ordinary summer afternoon on Oak Street, a lawnmower going somewhere down the block, and my thoughts kept drifting three years back, to my younger brother, Thomas, and to the funeral home where I had stood looking down at him in a dark suit he would have hated.

Thomas had been thirty-five.

A heart attack, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, had taken him without warning and left behind a wife, Evelyn, and two small children — Mason, who’d been three, and Daisy, just a baby.

I was thinking about all of that, screwdriver in hand, when I heard footsteps on my porch.

Small ones.

Slow, and uneven, and somehow wrong for a sunny afternoon.

I turned, expecting a neighbor’s kid, or a package, and instead I saw my six-year-old nephew standing at the top of my steps, holding his little sister’s hand, both of them filthy and exhausted, Mason’s face gray and set with a determination no child that age should have to wear.

“Uncle Christian,” he said, and his voice cracked.

“Mommy left again.

And Daisy was so hungry, and there wasn’t any food, so I remembered your address.”

I have thought since about why I couldn’t concentrate on that hinge, why a ten-minute job had stretched into an hour of me staring at nothing.

I want to believe it was something more than coincidence — that some part of me had been uneasy for a long time, and chose that particular afternoon to surface.

Because the truth is I had been uneasy for three years, in a low, buried, deniable way.

It lived under everything, that unease, a small wrongness I kept explaining away: the way Evelyn never quite let me finish a phone call, the way the children were always asleep or sick or unavailable, the way three years had gone by and I had laid eyes on my brother’s kids a handful of times, always briefly, always managed.

I had felt it and I had swallowed it, again and again, because feeling it fully would have required me to do something, and doing something would have meant not respecting the boundaries of a grieving widow, and so I had kept the unease pressed down where it couldn’t make trouble.