Chapter 1 — The Last-Minute Guest

Julian and I had been planning our family vacation for months.

We did everything that way — early, deliberately, with a spreadsheet and a shared calendar — because that was how Julian liked the world arranged, and because, after six years of marriage, I had stopped noticing how much of our life ran on his preferences rather than mine.

Chicago in late winter is a gray, heavy thing, and the promise of a week on a Pacific beach had been the small warm light I walked toward through the short dark days of January.

My younger brother, Jim, had recently started a new job and moved into a different apartment.

The changes had left him exhausted and stressed, the way any big life shift leaves a person worn thin, and when I called to check on him and heard how flat his voice had gone, I did the thing a big sister does.

I invited him to come with us.

His girlfriend had planned to come too, but she could not get the time away from work, so in the end Jim came alone.

At first, bringing him seemed like the perfect decision.

Our five-year-old daughter, Lily, adored her uncle.

She had adored him since she was old enough to have opinions about people, and the feeling was plainly mutual; Jim went soft and silly around her in a way he never did with anyone else.

Julian was enthusiastic about it too, which I noticed at the time and filed under his general generosity toward my family.

“Bring him,” he’d said, before I had even finished asking.

“It’ll be good for him.

Good for all of us.” He had smiled his easy, confident smile, the one that had first drawn me to him across a crowded fundraiser years ago, and I had felt, as I so often did, lucky.

Luck is the word I reached for again and again in those early years, and I never once examined it, because examining your luck feels like tempting it.

I simply accepted that I had married up, married well, married a man who moved through the world with an ease I envied, and I was grateful, and gratitude is a wonderful anesthetic.

I would spend a long time afterward turning that enthusiasm over in my hands, examining it from every angle, understanding at last that it had not been generosity at all.