He had wanted, all along, for there to be nothing to win, for his mother to simply love his child and for the box to ride home unopened and be quietly forgotten.

Winning, for Caleb, was not a victory.

It was the final proof of a loss he had spent years trying to avoid.

Chapter 26 — The Key to the Door

Beatrice lifted the folded white index card out of the box with shaking hands, hands nowhere near as steady as they had been that morning when she wrote the word GUEST on my daughter’s place card.

She unfolded it once.