Secret Passion

A package arrives at my husband's desk with no name on it. Inside is my mother's last afternoon, cut and sequenced by a stranger.

She died when I was fourteen. An accident - that's the word my whole life was built on top of, and I believed it, because you believe your father at fourteen. Then I lay out photographs of a dark sedan working through midtown traffic and read the man sitting beside her the way I read everyone, and I cannot make the reading stop.

He sent his men home that afternoon. You don't send your wall home on a whim. You send it home when there's something you don't want it to see.

I spent my whole childhood at the top of a staircase learning to hear the shape of a lie in his low even voice. I never once turned it on him, because there was a door in me I kept shut.

Now there's a hand on the other side of that door, and it isn't mine.

He taught me to ride a bike. He held the seat and ran beside me. He's also her killer. They're the same man.