Every guess was wrong, and none of them was as wrong as the truth, which was already walking up the front path in shoes I had paid for.
I breathed as shallowly as I could.
I counted the seconds.
I watched the slice of ordinary kitchen floor through the gap in the tablecloth — the same floor I’d done my homework on as a girl, the same baseboards my mother had painted one summer — and I waited, and the doorbell rang, and everything started.
Chapter 3 — The Shoes I Bought Him
My father took his time getting to the door.
I heard the deadbolt, the hinge, a murmur of voices in the entry, and then footsteps coming back toward the kitchen — two sets, my father’s familiar shuffle and another, heavier, more deliberate.
The second set of footsteps came into my slice of visible floor, and the blood in my body turned to ice water.
I knew those shoes.
Oxblood leather, hand-stitched, the kind of shoes a man buys to tell a room something about himself before he opens his mouth.
I knew them because I had bought them.
I had stood in a department store two Christmases ago and chosen them and paid for them and wrapped them, and watched him open the box on Christmas morning and kiss my cheek and call me the best thing that ever happened to him.
It was Damian.
My husband of twelve years.