I was none of those things.

I was a tired young woman with a sick child and a job I could not afford to lose, and everything that happened, I stumbled into by accident, one small terrible discovery at a time.

I think that is worth saying because I have come to believe that most of the real turning points in a life arrive that way, unbidden, disguised as ordinary bad nights.

You do not choose them.

They choose you, and then you are left to decide, in the moment, what kind of person you are going to be about them.

Chapter 2 — Three Hours of Walking

My son Theodore was nine months old that night, and he was teething, and he had a fever that made him miserable in the particular way that only a baby in pain can be miserable, which is to say inconsolably and at full volume.

For three solid hours I had walked him back and forth across the small maid’s quarters where the two of us lived, holding him against my shoulder, singing every soft lullaby I knew, offering him warm milk, doing every gentle thing a mother knows to do.

Nothing worked.

His whimpers only climbed toward wails, and the wails filled the little room and spilled into the hallway, and I grew frantic with the exhaustion of it and, I will admit, with fear.

I was not supposed to make noise in that house at night.

I had been told so plainly, in that cold way Christopher had of making a threat sound like a house rule.

And so I did the only thing left to me, which was to keep moving, to walk and walk and hope that motion would do what my arms alone could not.

In desperation, wanting only a change of scene, some new corner of that vast house to pace, I carried Theodore out of our quarters and down the corridor and, quietly, into the one room that was always still.