He had told me he was working late.

My mother lived forty minutes away.

There was no innocent version of my husband driving across the county in the dark to arrive on a seventy-one-year-old woman’s doorstep in the middle of the night.

Whatever this was, it had not been an accident, and it had not been spontaneous.

He had gone there on purpose, at an hour chosen so that no one would see.

The second thing I understood, standing there, was the shape of what he’d built.