Chapter 1 — The Price in This House

“If you keep asking questions, Rebecca, people in this house are going to think you don’t respect me — and disrespect, in this house, comes with a heavy price.”

Arthur Hollis stood in the doorway of my bedroom at nearly eleven at night with that twisted, unnatural smile I had learned to dread, and I understood, looking at him, that the pretense was over.

It was raining hard against the windows of our suburban home in Arlington, Virginia.

My husband, David, was in Chicago on a business trip.

My mother-in-law, Constance, had left that morning for a weekend in Richmond.

And Arthur had waited, patient as a spider, for the exact night the house would empty out and leave me alone with him.

My name is Rebecca.

I am twenty-nine, married to David for two years, and for most of those two years I had been telling myself that the way my father-in-law looked at me, the way he found reasons to corner me, the comments with their second meanings, were things I was imagining or overreacting to — because everyone I told had assured me I was.

That night, with the rain coming down and no one in the house to perform for, Arthur stopped bothering to hide it, and I saw the man underneath the retired-principal smile at last.

What he did not know was that I had stopped imagining things two months earlier.

What he did not know was that my phone, in the pocket of my robe, was recording every word.

There is a strange thing that happens when a person who has been gaslighting you finally drops the pretense, and I felt it fully in that doorway, and I want to describe it because it is not what you would expect.

You would think the fear would be the whole of it, and the fear was real.

But underneath the fear was something almost like relief — a terrible, vindicating relief — because for two years I had been made to doubt my own eyes, told by everyone I trusted that the thing I was seeing was not there, until I had begun to wonder if I was the problem after all, if I really was the oversensitive, suspicious, ungrateful woman they kept gently suggesting I was.

And now here was Arthur, with the house empty and no one to perform for, showing me plainly and unmistakably the exact thing I had been told for two years I was imagining.

I was not imagining it.

I had never been imagining it.