I did not know whether to feel gratitude or horror, and in the end I felt both, so large they could not fit in the same chest, and I have carried them side by side ever since.

There is a particular vertigo in owing your children’s lives to your husband’s incompetence at murdering them.

I have never found the words to fully hold it, and I have stopped trying.

Because the same man, in the same minute, was carrying my body toward a grave he had dug for me, and fumbling the one detail that would let me climb back out of it.

The love I had felt for him for fifteen years and the intent to kill me that he carried into that cemetery were, it turned out, both real, both present, occupying the same person at the same time — and I could not make them resolve into a single coherent man, because they do not resolve.