Chapter 1 — The Voice Over the Fence

I heard my brother’s voice before I ever reached the door.

“That bald woman shouldn’t let herself be seen when we’ve got company.”

It was Godfrey — I would know that lazy, entitled drawl anywhere — carrying clear across the yard on the warm afternoon air, and I stopped where I stood on the far side of the fence with my suitcase still in my hand.

I had not told anyone I was coming.

That was the whole point.

A shutdown at the metalworking shop up in Calgary had handed all of us a few unexpected weeks off, and while my coworkers scattered to visit their own families, I had gone straight to the airport and bought a ticket on the next flight south, because after four years away the only thing I wanted in the world was to walk through my own door unannounced and see my wife’s face when she realized I was home.

So no one knew.

No one was performing for me yet.

Whatever was happening in that house was happening the way it always happened, with no thought that the man who paid for all of it was standing ten feet away, listening.

I did not know, in that first moment, how much that would come to matter.

I only knew that my brother had just called someone a bald woman, in a voice full of contempt, and that there was only one woman who should have been in that house, and that she had a full head of dark hair the last time I had seen her face.

I had pictured this homecoming a thousand times in four years.

That is not an exaggeration; it is close to a literal count.

On the worst nights up north, when the cold got into the bones and the shop noise still rang in my ears and the loneliness sat on my chest like a weight, I would build the scene in my head to get myself to sleep.

I would come home unannounced.

Phedra would be in the kitchen, or the garden, or curled on the couch, and she would turn and see me and not believe it for a second, and then she would believe it, and she would come across the room and put her arms around me, and four years of exile would dissolve in that one embrace.

I had polished that daydream until it shone.