Chapter 1 — The Question

“Mom,” my five-year-old son asked from the bedroom doorway, clutching his little red toy car, “can grown-ups keep ugly secrets too?”

I froze in front of my open closet.

I had just come home from work and was reaching to change out of my blouse, and the question stopped my hand in the air, because there was a weight in the way he asked it that no five-year-old’s voice should have to carry.

“What kind of secret, sweetheart?” I asked, and I worked very hard to keep my voice easy and warm, even as my heart began to pick up speed.

Theo lowered his voice to a whisper, the way children do when they have been taught that a thing is dangerous.

“The one about Daddy and Aunt Jennifer,” he said.

“The lady who works with him.

Grandma Charlotte said I shouldn’t tell you, because it would make you sad, and then Daddy might leave our house.”

A cold that had nothing to do with the room spread down through my fingertips.

Solomon and I had been married for seven years.

He worked at an advertising agency downtown, and Jennifer was one of his senior account managers — I had met her, twice, at company functions, and she had been perfectly pleasant.

I want you to understand that my first feeling, in that doorway, was not for myself, or for my marriage, or even, yet, for the betrayal I was beginning to understand.

My first feeling, before all of those, was a pure and rising fury on behalf of the small person in front of me — because whatever else had happened, someone had reached into my child and planted a secret in him, and told him it was his job to keep it, and taught him to be afraid.

That was the first crime I saw.

It remained, through everything that followed, the one I found hardest to forgive.

And I have wondered why, in the long accounting of everything that was done to me and my family, that particular piece — the secret planted in a five-year-old — sat at the very top of the ledger, above the affair itself, above the lies, above the eighteen months of betrayal.

Solomon betrayed our marriage; that was a wound to me, an adult, a person equipped, however painfully, to bear it.