Someday I'll tell you all of it," I say. "I'd like that," he says. "No," I say. "I promise you won't.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden's face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions

I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

My sisters were in that van.