The third was the one I did not want and could not put down, which was that something had been done to her and that a vehicle was the story.

And the fourth was the one that turned out to be true and that I could not have constructed, because it required knowing a thing about that family that I had been married into for six years and had never once understood.

What I decided on that plane — and I decided it deliberately, with a pen, on the back of a boarding pass, because that is how I do things — was a list of four rules for myself.

I would not go to the Gaddis place.