But I could feel its shape out there in the dark, the way you feel the presence of a cliff edge before you can see it, and I knew that if the scar meant what I feared it meant, then a good and gentle man had died alone and nameless while the family who loved him mourned someone else, and that I had, in my innocence, just married the person responsible.

Chapter 11 — I Set a Trap

I did not confront him.

I want to be clear about why, because it was not cowardice, though it may have looked like it.

It was arithmetic of a different kind.

If I was wrong, if this was grief and sleeplessness and an old scar I had simply never noticed, then to accuse my new husband of being my dead one would be to detonate a family, to break his heart and his mother’s and my own daughter’s, over nothing but my own broken mind.

But if I was right, then I had been living beside a monstrous lie for three years, and the man in my bed was not who he said he was, and I needed proof before I said a single word to anyone.