Every red light stretched.

Neither of us said a word.

There are silences that separate people and silences that hold two people inside the same dread, and this was the second kind — the first thing Matthias and I had truly shared in two weeks, this not-knowing, this drive toward a door with something terrible behind it.

I kept looking at the back of his neck as he drove, at the set of his shoulders, and thinking that I did not know what I wanted to be on the other side of Fabian’s door.

Part of me — the part still bruised and furious — wanted the secret to be enormous, to be something that would explain and even indict Matthias, that would make his cruelty in the hospital into the smaller sin next to some larger family rot.

And part of me, the part that had loved this man for nine years and made five children with him, was simply afraid, the way you are afraid when a person you have built your life around is about to be revealed as the child of a lie.