That I had it, once again, completely and catastrophically wrong.

Lucy stepped in close to me, and her eyes were burning.

“And if you think this is the worst of it, Alexander,” she said quietly, “then you don’t even know yet why your father had the stroke in the first place.”

Chapter 6 — Two in the Morning

She told me all of it, that night, standing in that cold and dripping room, and she told it without softening a single word.

Six months earlier, a nurse at a public hospital out in the far suburbs had called her at two in the morning, because Lucy’s old cell number was still sitting in an archived file as my father’s secondary emergency contact — a number no one had ever bothered to remove.