Waiting for the moment when the door would open, and my father would step back into the world of love and safety that he had created for us.

But every night, as the minutes stretched into hours, I wondered if this would be the night he didn’t.

Then, one day, my waiting changed. It wasn’t that the fear disappeared—no, that stayed, lodged in my chest like a splinter. But my focus shifted. Something else began to creep into the space my father’s absence left behind.

It happened on a warm afternoon, the kind where the sunlight hung low and heavy in the sky, drenching the world in gold. I was eleven years old when my father walked through the front door with a shadow trailing behind him. It wasn’t the kind of shadow that could be swept away by light or time. It wasn’t a shadow in the way that the sun casts one against the pavement, not something flat and fleeting. No, this was a living thing, stretching across the threshold, reaching for me.

The door creaked open, and with it, something else—something heavier—entered.

He did not arrive like sunlight spilling through an open window, warm and bright and gentle.

He arrived like twilight—slow and certain, settling into every corner of me before I realized I had already let him in.

I would later come to recognize that moment as the beginning of change, of heartache, of something inevitable and unstoppable. I would come to realize, in the months and years that followed, that this was the beginning of everything.

1

BEVERLY, 1993

11 years old

It was Wednesday, March 3rd, and I was on the phone with my best friend, Tiffany, giggling about boys—something we had only recently decided were interesting rather than gross. I sat at the bottom of the staircase, twirling the phone cord in my fingers, when I saw my father coming down the walkway. My heart leaped with relief, as it always did when he returned safe.

“I think Caleb likes you,” Tiffany teased. It was our favorite pastime—talking about the boys in our school, the ones we used to think had cooties but were suddenly worth our attention.

“Do you think so?” I grinned. “Because—” I was about to finish my sentence when the door creaked open, cutting me off mid-thought.

For the first time, Dad wasn’t alone. There was a boy trailing behind him, small and thin, his head bowed low. It wasn’t cold that day, but something about the way he stood there, his face half-hidden behind my father’s broad frame, made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

His frail frame was swallowed by oversized clothes, and his long, unkempt blond hair fell into his face like a curtain meant to shield him from the world. He lifted his eyes just long enough for me to catch their color. Green. Strikingly so.