They’d married three short months later, the flush of their love driving them to promises best not made, self-written vows about lifelong fidelity and never-ending support for one another’s careers, come thick or thin.

Thin came too quickly.

Soon after their marriage, they’d been at a conference together—just once, she’d never do that again—and the moderator asked what their life was like. Two creatives in one house. It must be amazing. You probably share an office, each tapping away.

Ethan laughed, and there was something in that offhand gust of amused breath that made a hand go up in the crowd. A man, of course it was a man, in a voice as pompous and bombastic as Sutton had ever heard, stood and shot an arrow through her heart.

“Don’t you feel, Mr. Montclair, that your books are more important than your wife’s? That you, as a literary author, are creating significant, essential work, and your wife, the genre writer, is simply generating entertainment for the masses?”

Her husband, the literary star, the Author with a capital A, had grinned and waved his hand toward Sutton. “But she’s such a pretty writer.”

The whole crowd had laughed, and Ethan laughed, and Sutton had to smile along, all the while feeling small and insignificant. She knew she was less in his mind, and in the minds of many of his peers. Ethan was God’s gift to literature; Sutton was a second-class citizen. Every time she thought of that moment, the words came unbidden. The words she’d heard when Ethan had dismissed her work, catering to the crowd. You are no one. You are nothing.

That her first award would drive a small but workable wedge between them was understandable. It was the second award, a truly prestigious one, that created the real problem. Oh, on the surface, things looked okay. Ethan claimed far and wide how very proud he was of his wonderful, talented wife. What an amazing writer she was. Never an author. No, never that.

All the while, at home, their happy life was withering away, those beautiful hands no longer touching her or the laptop keys or anything important. He went on long walks in the afternoons, came home smelling of bourbon and other women.

She was failing him. Failing their marriage. And then came the surprise of all surprises.

They named him Dashiell.

The Ghost of Papa

THE GHOST OF PAPA

Now

Paris was warm today, and Sutton was done with the indulgences. Her walk took her past the École Militaire, full of screaming, laughing children on some sort of recess break—she wondered how they ever learned anything, as they seemed to always be outside throughout the school day, shouting with glee at the singular fact of being children. Parisian mothers seemed to know something American mothers didn’t, some key that Sutton had always been missing.