Strong-smelling.

You’d best not open it.”

I didn’t sleep that night.

I lay in the dark beside my husband, listening to him breathe, and I understood that the woman asleep down the hall had built ten years of devotion — the cooking, the childcare, the morning tea — into a structure with a single hidden purpose, and that my own daughter, at eight, had seen through it before I had.

I lay there and did the thing I had spent two years unable to do, which was to see my own life clearly.

In the dark, with the terrible new knowledge, everything that had confused me resolved at once into a single awful pattern.