Chapter 1 — The Sound of Laughter

I came home early on a Wednesday expecting silence.

Instead, I heard my mother laughing.

That alone was enough to stop me in the marble foyer with my coat half off my shoulders.

I stood very still and listened, the way you listen to a sound you cannot place, and it took me a moment to understand what it was, because it had been so long since I had heard it.

My mother did not laugh anymore.

She had not laughed in months, not since the diagnosis had turned our enormous house into a quiet, well-staffed waiting room, and the sound of it now, drifting down the grand staircase, was so unexpected that for a second I thought I had imagined it.

I even reached out and put a hand against the cold marble of the banister, the way you steady yourself when the ground has done something you did not expect.

The house had been a place of hushed voices and soft footsteps for eight months.

Laughter did not belong in it anymore, and hearing it there was like hearing music in a church at the wrong hour — not unwelcome, exactly, but so out of place that the mind refuses it before the heart can catch up.

I had built my life on controlling my surroundings.

In my line of work a man who is surprised is a man who is vulnerable, and I had spent fifteen years making certain I was never surprised — not by rivals, not by partners, not by the police, not by anyone.

I knew the schedule of every person under my roof.

I knew who was supposed to be in the house at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, and the answer was almost no one, and certainly no one who could make my dying mother laugh like that.

I knew, too, the texture of my own house the way a captain knows his ship, every creak and current of it, and nothing in that knowledge accounted for the sound.

It was not the television.

It was not the radio my mother sometimes left on for company.

It was her own voice, lifted in something I had assumed the disease had taken from her for good, and the impossibility of it pulled me up the stairs faster than curiosity ever could have.