The Secret Place
I have since had this described to me as the moment I lost my marriage, and I want to correct it, because it is not accurate and the accurate version matters.
I did not lose my marriage at that window.
What I saw at that window was a woman who had lied to me for nine years about whether her father was alive.
That is enormous and it is not survivable and I understand why nobody looks past it.
But there is a version of Antonia in that room who I could have found my way back to — a woman who had been twenty-six when her family invented a death, who had gone along with it because the alternative was unbearable, and who had then spent nine years unable to find a door back out of a lie that got harder every year.
I do not say that to be generous.