Chapter 6 — Under the Blanket

That night, while she slept, I lifted the edge of the blanket, still half-believing I was looking for proof of an affair.

What I found instead stopped my breath.

There were bruises — old and new, the marks of grips and of worse, the kind of injuries that do not come from any accident and do not get explained away.

I will not set down here what I counted on my wife’s body, because the inventory of it is not what this account is for, and because she did not survive it to become a list.

It is enough to say that I understood, in one held breath in the dark, everything the flinch had meant.