Chapter 1

How was she supposed to choose among these treasures? A photo in a tarnished frame. A ceramic dish made by small hands, thickly glazed, signed with a wobbly C. A silver teaspoon with a design of roses, one of a set her sister now owned but never used. Maris picked up each object and set it down again on the cold, smooth expanse of marble in the master bathroom of the house she was leaving today.

“Mar?”

The voice startled her—it didn’t belong here. Hadn’t in a while. In two weeks and five days, in fact: he left on a Tuesday, which she remembered because he didn’t even take the bins to the curb one last time. As though, having made up his mind, he was excused and exempt from every responsibility of the life that once connected them. As she dragged the bins back up the driveway that evening, she’d imagined their marriage as a wicker basket, the strands now broken and sprung, the bottom about to give way. But unlike Jeff, she had expected to shatter. Wouldn’t you? she’d thought despairingly, watching the quiet street through the bedroom window, as her neighbors came home from their jobs, their errands, their exercise classes and children’s playdates. Wouldn’t you have broken too?

“I just needed a few things from the garage,” Jeff said sheepishly, looking not at Maris but at the newel post. She stood at the bottom of the stairs. He stood half in and half out the front door, letting in the heat. She thought about the air conditioner: she must remember to turn it off when she left.

“What things?”

“Just—you know. My clubs, the barbecue tools.” He scowled. “I didn’t know you were home. I already loaded up the car.”

A lie, and one into which he put very little effort. Her car was in the garage too; he couldn’t have missed it. Besides, where was she supposed to have gone? She had haunted this house like a wraith for a year now; it was careless of him to pretend otherwise. But that was as good a word as any for what Jeff had become. Careless. He didn’t care. He couldn’t care less. About her, about the life she thought they would cling to together, about—and surely it wasn’t true, she shouldn’t even allow herself to think it—about Calla.

“I’m going to Alana’s,” she said abruptly, too tired to correct him. “You mean—to stay?”

She shrugged. How to answer that? The future lay ahead of her, unknowable, unimaginable. If there was another option—like, for instance, just disappearing, winking into nonexistence like a light turned off—she might very well take it. “For now, anyway.”

“Does that mean we can move ahead on the house?”

All traces of guilt were gone from his voice now. Anger surged inside Maris—cold, sharp, more real than anything she had felt in a long time. Her phone buzzed; she took it out of her pocket, barely glancing at the screen. “I have to take this,” she snapped.

Jeff held up his hands, conciliatory, aware—maybe—that he’d pushed her too far. He backed out the door, mouthed “see you later,” and scuttled toward his car like a kid on his way to recess. Maris shoved the door unnecessarily hard and it slammed shut.

It was a 925 number, not one she recognized. Ordinarily she’d let it go to voice mail—the truth was she let nearly all her calls go to voice mail, even Alana’s—but the afterburn of anger at Jeff propelled her to answer.

“Hello?”

“Maris.” A voice she never thought she would have to hear again. “It’s Ron. Ron Isherwood.”

“You.” Her voice came out like dried leaves. Pain like she hadn’t known since the early days, searing and slicing. “How can you—what do you—”

“I just want to say . . .”

There was a rushing sound, which Maris thought was her own mind ripping from its moorings—finally, finally, splintering apart. She was only surprised that it had taken so long.

But she recognized a pattern to the sounds coming through the phone: the tap of a horn, the rush of passing cars. Ron Isherwood was calling her from the side of a road. But there was something more in the sound of tires on asphalt, a metallic whisper that didn’t fit.

“I’m hanging up,” she whispered. Through the glass side panels flanking the front door, she saw Jeff ’s car drive away, wavering like a mirage through the textured glass.

“No, wait.” Ron Isherwood cleared his throat. “I—I’m . . . this is the last thing I need to say. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. How very sorry I am. This—this is for you.” He was crying now, the way men cry, choking off every syllable, the words melting together.

“Ron, don’t. Stop.” Maris’s voice came back, and along with comprehension came rage. Her vocabulary of emotions diminished to shades of fury and sorrow. How dare he—how could he do this to her? When she’d finally, maybe, almost become numb enough to take a few tottering steps, to leave this place. Escaping to Alana’s was cowardly, but hadn’t she earned a measure of cowardice?

But even that was too much to ask, apparently. She knew what Ron was doing—he was throwing it all back on her, in the guise of a gift. His life, as recompense. Because he couldn’t endure any longer. He was breaking under the weight of it, and so he would make her complicit.

But that was her lot, a mother’s lot. Had been, since that murky night eighteen years ago in the thin-walled little apartment in San Ramon she and Jeff had lived in after they married, when Calla was conceived in a jerking fit of cheap-wine fervor. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, put her hand on the hall table for support. “Where are you?” she demanded, in the steady, no-nonsense voice of the mother she had once been.

“I’m”—indistinct snuffling, sobbing—“The bridge. I’m on the bridge. I wanted . . . whatever you want me to do, Maris. I’m ready. If it helps, if it could—”

“Stay there.”

Maris opened her eyes and found herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror hung over the hall table. She looked grim, exhausted, awful—but she was still standing. You don’t spend all your working hours with suburban privileged teens, urban dead-end kids, your own child—because yes, damn it, Maris had raised that child from birth through all the usual struggles into a pretty amazing young woman, she had done that while Jeff flew business class and played golf and struggled to uproot himself from his own family—you don’t do all of those things without building up a reserve for moments like this. Moments when the weak ones fail, the battered ones give up, the broken ones cry out for someone to take their hand.

“Do not do anything. I mean it, Ron.” Maris squeezed the phone harder and gathered her strength. “Please.”

A long pause, the cars going past, the moments of this life, hers and his, twined together in links forged in misery, splattered with the blood of all that had ever been precious. “I just wanted to give you something,” he finally said, his voice thin and breaking, just before he hung up.