I turn that over at night sometimes, the sheer thinness of the margin.

If I had been a different kind of mother — the kind who is too busy, too distracted, too quick to say not now, not here, tell me later — she might have swallowed the secret the way children swallow so many, and the box would have gone home under our bed, and the papers would have been signed, and my brother would be in a cell right now while I went on being a laundered man’s unknowing wife.

None of us would ever have known how close the other life had come.

It did not go that way.