Chapter 1 — Bathe Her Yourself

“I want you to bathe her.

In our tub.

And please — don’t call the staff.

Do it yourself.”

I stood in the doorway of my own home and thought, for the first time in nine years of marriage, that my husband had lost his mind.

My name is Mariana.

I am thirty years old, and until that afternoon I believed I knew everything there was to know about Alejandro, the man I had married.

He owned a string of commercial construction firms across Chicago, and he had more money than the two of us could spend in three lifetimes.

But he had a habit that could drive me to the edge of my patience: when he fixed his mind on some act of charity, nothing on earth could move him off it.

That week his crusade had been a soup kitchen near the downtown bus terminal.

He was tired, he said, of writing large checks for photographs, of generosity that never touched the people it was meant for.

He wanted to serve the soup himself, to look the people in the eye.

I had not shared his enthusiasm.

And now he was asking me to draw a bath for a stranger, and I did not yet understand that the next hour was going to take everything I believed about myself and turn it over in my hands.

Chapter 2 — Some People Prefer It

I should tell you who I was that morning, before any of it happened, because the woman I was that morning is the point of the whole story.

Over coffee, when Alejandro told me about his plan for the soup kitchen, I had scoffed.