Chapter 1 — The Silhouette in the Hall

On the night of my wedding, in the small hours, I saw a woman slip into my father’s bedroom — and for a few terrible minutes, standing in a dark hallway, I was convinced that woman was my own wife.

I want to be honest that those minutes are the ones I am most ashamed of, out of everything that happened in the months that followed, because they revealed something about how I had been raised to see the world, and it was not good.

But I am starting there anyway, because that hallway is where the truth of my family began, for me, to come apart — and coming apart, it turned out, was the only thing that could save it.

I woke at forty-three minutes past midnight.

My wife’s side of the bed was empty.

I lay there a moment, half-asleep, assuming she had gone to the bathroom, and then I heard a small metallic sound from the far end of the corridor — from my father’s room.

His door was cracked open an inch, and through that inch, in the low light of a lamp, I could see the shape of a woman.

Long dark hair.

A slender frame.

About my wife’s height.

My blood went cold, and my mind, without my permission, leapt to the worst and most shameful place it could reach.

I backed away from that door with my legs shaking, and I went back to my room, and I sat on the edge of my marriage bed with a suspicion in my chest that I am still not proud of having held, even for a moment, even in the dark, even before I knew anything at all.

Chapter 2 — Daniel Sterling

My name is Daniel Sterling.

I am thirty-two years old, and I fix agricultural equipment for a living at a repair shop outside Syracuse, New York.

My wife, Mariana, is twenty-eight, and she teaches pre-kindergarten, which is to say she spends her days being patient and kind with small people, a skill that would matter a great deal in the months to come.

We married on a crisp Saturday in October, after nearly three years together, and we held the reception at my parents’ place — a big ranch-style house with a sprawling backyard, a detached workshop, and a few guest rooms my father had built out over the years as his business grew.