My body knew, is the thing.

Some animal part of me, the part that lives beneath language, sensed that the man doing all these kindnesses was not who he claimed to be, and it registered that wrongness as a low, persistent unease that I could never quite name.

But I did not have the right story to attach the unease to.

The only story available to me was the ordinary, painful one: that I was a grieving widow confusing my dead husband with his living twin, that the warmth and the wrongness alike were symptoms of my own unhealed heart.

So every time my instinct flared, I turned it against myself.