Even unconscious in a hospital across the city, Paulina Marsden had a hold on me.

That was the truth of our whole relationship, distilled into a rusted padlock — that I was thirty-five years old, a mother myself, and still, standing at that shed, some part of me expected her hand to come down and split my lip again for asking.

The slap when I was a girl had done its work well.

It had taught me that this shed was the one question in the world I was never to ask, and I had obeyed that lesson so completely that I had walked past this structure at a hundred family holidays without once letting myself wonder, as an adult, why a garden shed needed a padlock that good.

The mind protects itself by not looking.

My whole childhood had been an education in not looking, and I had graduated with honors.