Part One: The Text

The message came in on a Tuesday in April at 6:52 in the morning while I was putting a thermos in a truck, and it was forty-one words long, and I read it about nine times standing in a driveway in Modesto.

Emil.

I heard from Willa that Odile is getting married in June.

I would like to come.

I am not going to make it a thing.

If it is a no I will accept that but I am asking you and not her.

I want to start with what I actually noticed, which was none of the things a person would expect.

I did not notice that my ex-wife had contacted me for the first time in six years.

I noticed that she knew about the wedding.

And I noticed the name in the second sentence, which was my youngest daughter’s, and which had no business being in a text message from a woman who had not seen her since she was nine months old.

I did not chase that.

I want to be honest at the front about how bad I was at all of this, and the first piece of evidence is that on the twenty-second of April I read a sentence that contained the entire answer to everything that happened afterward, and I skipped over it, because I was standing in a driveway at ten to seven and I had a shift.

Maren Ostlund left our apartment in Stockton in the September of 2010.

I was thirty-four.

She was twenty-nine.

We had six daughters: Odile was eleven, Teddy was nine, Bea was seven, Ines and Solveig were five, and Willa was nine months old.

Six children in eleven years, with one set of twins, which people always want to comment on and which I have stopped explaining.