I Came Home Unannounced After Four Years Abroad and Found My Wife Starved and Shaved in the Backyard. My Mother Said She’d Brought It on Herself. I Didn’t Yell

There was not.

Somewhere in those eleven months the house had stopped being the future I’d dreamed of on cold nights in Calgary and become something else — a monument to what had been done in it, its beautiful rooms built on my wife’s hunger.

I did not want to live inside that.

I did not want Phedra to ever have to walk back through a door she’d been dragged out of and made to sleep behind.

A house is only wood and stone; it holds whatever you put into it, and too much had been put into that one.