I would keep the ledger.

I would keep believing what I saw with my own eyes, even when I was told, gently and reasonably and with a laugh, that I hadn’t seen it.

That vow was the only thing I brought out of those first weeks intact, and in the end it was the thing that saved us both.

Chapter 5 — Something Is Wrong in This House

In the weeks that followed I began, without meaning to, to keep a kind of ledger.

Not on paper — in my head, in the back of it, the way you keep track of a sound in a car that you can’t quite locate and can’t quite ignore.