Every brick of it was bought with a lie.

We’re going to find a new home — a small one, a real one, ours — where nobody knows either of us, and where no one, as long as I am alive and breathing, is ever going to be allowed to hurt you again.”

My wife turned her face into my shoulder as I drove, and she wept — but they were a different kind of tears than the ones she had wept in the yard, and I felt four years of terror and five months of abandonment at last begin to melt out of her body, into me, where I could carry it for her.

I drove us away from the house of lies, into the sun, and I did not look back once.

People have asked me, since, whether it was hard to drive away from that house — the house my own money built, the house that was, after all, legally at least partly mine, a valuable thing I was walking away from.

And they are always surprised by how easy it was.