I’m twenty-four, newly separated, living temporarily in my mother’s house after my marriage collapsed. My mother has just remarried a rich, cold, older man—Gabriel—who is everything my soft ex-husband wasn’t.
* * *
The key turns in the lock at 11:47 p.m. and the sound goes straight between my legs.
I am sitting on the edge of the guest-room bed in the dark, still wearing the thin cotton nightgown my mother bought me “for comfort.” It barely covers the tops of my thighs. I have been listening to the house for two hours—the low murmur of their voices downstairs, the clink of ice in glasses, the occasional soft laugh that does not sound like my mother’s usual laugh. Then the front door opens and closes. Car doors. Silence. He is home alone with me.
My mother is at her sister’s for the w
