She heard that in her head as she walked the aisle and said, “I do.” And she did. She pushed all the questions and doubt away and plunged in.

And then, one summer day five years after the wedding, things fell apart. It happened, strangely enough, with the idea of cleaning her house, top to bottom. While Janet was content in her playpen, Barbara rolled up her sleeves and chose to start with the spare room upstairs. She opened the closet and removed clothes she didn’t even know she had. In ten minutes she had her first load ready for Goodwill and felt she was making progress.

She took everything from the shelf above the clothes—photo albums, magazines, a strongbox with birth certificates and important papers, and mementos collected from their honeymoon. With everything clear, she noticed a square piece of wood in the ceiling slightly askew, probably the entry to the attic crawl space. The panel sat funny, revealing a hole, like it had been recently moved. She tried to reach it, but even on tiptoes she couldn’t. She carried the crooked, paint-scarred stepladder from the garage, checking on Janet. She climbed the ladder and pushed at the board, but instead of aligning it, she became curious. What was up there? She took another step up and peeked over the edge of the opening.

What Barbara saw sent her life into a spiral. Videos. Magazines. Those were bad enough. What took her breath away were pictures in a plastic bag. She opened them and looked through them. These were not old pictures but recent. As she stared at them, all the doubt she had felt while dating and in the last five years rose like a mushroom cloud. The man she thought she had married, the one who called her “love,” was not who she thought he was. He wore a mask. And the pictures showed the face behind it.

Standing on that ladder, seeing the truth, had crushed Barbara. But she also resolved then and there that she would never be taken in by anyone. She would never let someone convince her they were something they weren’t. She had learned the hard way you couldn’t trust anybody. If you did, they’d let you down.

Now, driving to Brookshire, seeing Hannah in her peripheral vision, she felt like she was on some rickety ladder. She had gone through unimaginable hurt and pain with Janet, who sneaked around with T-bone, who lied about where she was going and what she was doing. All she had left of her daughter was a photo album and a gravestone.

The summer sun was still up when they arrived at Brookshire. The school grounds were immaculately trimmed.

“Sure looks different than Franklin High,” Hannah said.