I ate my mother’s enormous celebratory dinner and I felt the wrongness of it in my stomach like a stone, and I did what I had always done with that feeling.

I swallowed it, and I passed the potatoes, and I let the people at the table decide what I was allowed to know.

Chapter 5 — So You Never Told Him

I barely slept.

In the morning my aunt Renee — my mother’s younger sister — came by for coffee, and the three of us sat at the kitchen island, and I brought up Samantha again, because I could not make myself leave it alone.

My mother turned on me at once.