It is a grief on top of a grief that the man who fooled her most completely, for the longest time, was one of her own sons, that the very confidence she had carried her whole life, I know my boys, became the door through which the deception walked.

She had earned the right to that confidence over decades.

He spent it in an afternoon.

That night, Camila stayed with her grandparents.

The house was very quiet when we came home to it, the particular dead quiet of a home that has been emptied of a child for the evening.

He closed the bedroom door, and for the first time in all the years I had known him, we were no longer a widow and her brother-in-law, but a husband and a wife, and I felt shy, and glad, and only a little haunted, and I had no idea at all that I was minutes away from the moment my whole life would quietly split in two.

Chapter 7 — The Fishhook Scar