The dark house showed me there had never been a family there to be found wanting by.

There had only ever been an appetite, wearing the costume of a family, and I had been the one feeding it.

Watching them in the dark, I stopped feeling like the outsider who’d failed to belong, and started feeling like a woman who’d finally stopped pouring water into a bucket with no bottom.

Chapter 9 — Seven in the Morning

By seven the next morning Dashiell was at my gate with his hair pasted to his forehead and his voice gone to gravel.

“Honey.