Chapter 9 — Two Weapons

I had always known my mother was elegant in public and something colder in private.

I had mistaken that coldness for ordinary ambition.

I had been wrong, and my wife had paid for my wrongness.

They had used two weapons on her, and both were mine.

My absence, first — the six months in which there was no one in the house to stand between Ingrid and them, no one whose name she could invoke, no answer when she called.