Antonia has a brother.

His name is Casper Rask and he is four years older than her and he lives outside Milwaukee and installs commercial HVAC systems, and in nine years of marriage I met him twice, both times at weddings, both times briefly, and I had been given to understand that there had been “a falling-out around the time of Dad.”

I called him on the Thursday.

It was the single most useful phone call of the nineteen months.