When I Got Home From My Night Shift at 6:14 A.M., I Found My Husband in the Guest Room With My Sister While My Five-Year-Old Slept on the Cold Kitchen Floor — I Picked Up My Boy and Left Without Waking Either of Them, and by Sunrise I Understood the Guest Room Was the Smallest and Least Ugly Part of the Truth

He just hadn’t thought of the cloud, or of my brother, or, most of all, of me.

Chapter 13 — Two O’Clock

At two o’clock that afternoon, my husband was sitting at our kitchen table, rehearsing his gentle, reasonable excuses, when the front door opened.

He stood, smoothing his shirt, arranging his face into the practiced mask of a concerned and slightly wounded husband.

“Bernice — thank God.

Where have you been?

Where’s Roger?” I didn’t answer him.

I stepped into the entryway, and I moved aside, and two people came in behind me: a woman in a dark blazer, and a man with a badge.