Chapter 1 — THE SIDE DOOR

Wren House sits at the end of six hundred feet of gravel in Ashgrove, Connecticut, and the gravel is the first thing that tells you what kind of family you are dealing with.

Nobody has a gravel drive because it is practical.

You have a gravel drive so that nobody can arrive quietly.

I heard myself coming the whole way up.

It was the fourteenth of October, a grey Tuesday, four fifteen in the afternoon, and I was thirty-four weeks and two days pregnant.

I had a 2016 Honda with a cracked wing mirror and an empty suitcase on the back seat.

I had come for clothes.

That is all. I want that on the record at the front of this, because it got argued about later by people in good suits: I came for a suitcase of my own clothes, three boxes of sheet music, and a shoebox of photographs, and I had told Margot Halloway I was coming, by text, forty minutes earlier, and she had not replied.

I parked by the side entrance because eight months pregnant you park at the closest door and you do not think about what it looks like.

Then I sat there with both hands on the wheel for a minute and breathed through the ache that had been living in my lower back since August.

Get in.

Get out.

No conversation.

I had rehearsed those three lines the whole drive from the apartment I now rent above a hardware store on Bell Street, which is one room and a hot plate and a window that faces a parking lot, and which I had come to love in the specific way you love a place that nobody else has keys to.

The side door was unlocked.

It is always unlocked. Wren House has never once been locked in the daytime in the entire time I knew it, because locking a door is something people do when they are worried, and the Halloways were not worried people.

Inside, it smelled the way it always smelled.

Lemon polish and cold stone and, underneath, very faintly, cigarettes from about 1994.

I went up the back stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, one hand under the shelf of my stomach, and I got to the guest room where I had slept for six weeks after Adam's funeral and where my things had sat ever since.

The bed was made.

Of course it was.

I packed the dresses that were mine and left the ones Margot had bought me — four of them, all still with tags, all in a size that had been a comment rather than a guess.

I got the sheet music. I got the photographs.

And then I sat down on the edge of the bed for a moment, because I needed to, and because I had something in my bag I had been carrying around for three days like a stone in a pocket.

The twenty-week scan is the one everybody frames.

The thirty-four-week one is uglier and better. She was too big to fit in the frame. You get a profile, a fist, and a foot pressed against the wall of me.

I had four printouts and I kept one loose in the side pocket so I could look at it in car parks.

I looked at it for maybe thirty seconds.

Then the door opened without a knock.

Margot Halloway is fifty-five and looks forty-eight and has looked forty-eight since I met her.

Black hair, professionally black, cut blunt at the jaw. That afternoon she was in a red wool dress with long sleeves and the gold drop earrings that had been her mother's, and she stood in the doorway with her weight on one hip and let the silence go on for exactly as long as she wanted it to.

Behind her, in the hall, Roz was carrying folded towels and had stopped walking.

"So," Margot said. "You're still here."

"I'm nearly done."

"Are you."

"I'm taking my clothes and the music. That's it."

She came in and shut the door behind her with two fingers, softly, the way you close a door when you want the other person to notice that you have closed it.

"Everything in this house is mine now."

"I know that."

"Do you." She looked at the suitcase. "What's in the bag?"

"Margot—"

"What is in the bag, Elise."

I have thought about this a great deal since, and I am fairly sure that if I had simply said nothing, or lied, or zipped it and walked past her, none of the rest of it would have happened.

Instead I did the thing you do when you have spent two years being told you are a liar.

I proved I wasn't.

I opened the bag and took out the scan and held it up.

"Sheet music. Photographs. And this."

Margot looked at it.

I watched her face for about a second and a half, and in that second and a half something went out of it that I had never seen go out of it before.

Not anger.

Margot Halloway was angry the entire time I knew her; anger was her resting state and it was almost restful to be around because you always knew where you were.

This was different.

This was calculation, and then, at the end of it, decision.

"Give me that."

"No."

"Give it to me."

"It's a picture of my daughter."

And Margot Halloway said the sentence that eleven months later a woman in a black robe read out loud from a transcript, in a room with a flag in it, while I sat six feet away holding a fourteen-month-old on my knee.

"That thing is not a Halloway."

I said, "I'm going home."

I picked up the suitcase, and I did not have a free hand, and that detail matters more than anything else in this chapter.

I went out into the hallway.