The suspicion that makes you good at the work is the very thing that would poison the marriage, so you leave it at the office door, and you walk in your own home unarmed, and that is exactly as it should be, right up until the day it isn’t.

Chapter 3 — The Tug at My Dress

Then, on the fourth afternoon, everything changed.

Lily and I were walking back from the beach, her small hand sandy and warm in mine, when she tugged on the hem of my dress.

I looked down at her.

She had stopped walking, and she was glancing back over her shoulder toward the shoreline, where Julian and Jim stood a little apart from the other guests, having one of their quiet conversations with their heads bent close together.

There was something in my daughter’s face I did not recognize.