Both their faces changed at once. My mother grabbed my arm and beamed.

Tara immediately started talking about a custom truck, an upscale spa she wanted to open, a trip to Miami.

Chapter 2 — What She’d Been Hiding

That evening, in the cold little room they’d given Della, my wife finally began to talk.

She unbuttoned her blouse and showed me a fresh scar left by a surgical biopsy.

“I have breast cancer, Caleb,” she whispered. “They found the tumor five months ago.”

She told me how she had begged my mother for three hundred dollars to see a doctor.